Developing multimedia applications entails understanding a variety of advanced tech- nologies; in addition, multimedia programming poses a significant challenge in terms of handling a variety of hardware devices, multimedia formats or communication protocols. Therefore, break- through software engineering technologies should be applied to produce reference architectures able to support ever-changing requirements. In this paper, we first present the challenges that designers must face in multimedia programming, and how current frameworks address them, specially regarding the management of architectural evolution. We then show what breakthrough approaches or technologies can be used to produce more reusable, extensible and open multi- media systems. We focus on presenting the benefits of applying component-based software de- velopment and application framework technologies. We also illustrate how to componentize all multimedia functionalities and (re)use the resulting components as COTS in application frame- works. This approach helps to add multimedia capabilities to an application without requiring specific knowledge on multimedia.