The UMEDIA consortium aims at establishing a European Network of Excellence (NoE) in Multimedia Technology. Networking excellent research laboratories aims to protect European wide leadership in science and technology and the commercialization of its results. Multidisciplinary and focused research under strong management will result in strong participation in standardization efforts and the creation of highlyskilled European scientific research teams competitive on international level. Focus areas embedded in Ambient Multimedia support our efforts in creating a European wide strong competitive consortium of a highly interconnected research network. User related factors cover human centered approaches, such as e.g. user perception. The exchange and European wide integration of infrastructure support the common utilization of research labs and tackling redundancy of existing equipment. The deployed of adaptable content on this infrastructure relates to new media types distributed to scalable platforms.