At present, the use of multiple media content in web pages is evolving at an astonishing rate. Each week there are new multimedia extensions launched in the http://extensions.joomla.org extensions directory. Launching almost as quickly are new social / media web portals, offering the ability to interact and stream media content into your site pages. Some of these popular portals are defining new multimedia features and setting new standards for website user interactions.

Your Joomla! Content Management System has lots of great built-in multimedia capabilities; these enriched with third-party extensions and streaming media sources can help evolve your default Joomla! website into a powerful media-rich interactive experience for your visitors.

This chapter is an introduction to multimedia, and how Joomla! interacts with these media elements.