Long term market viability of multimedia services requires significant improvements to the tools, functionality, and systems to support target users. aceMedia seeks to overcome the barriers to market success which include user difficulties in finding desired content, limitations in the tools available to manage personal and purchased content, and high costs to commercial content owners for multimedia content processing and distribution, by creation of means to generate semantic-based, context and user aware content, able to adapt itself to users' preferences and environments. aceMedia will build a system to extract and exploit meaning inherent to the content in order to automate annotation and to add functionality that makes it easier for all users to create, communicate, find, consume and re-use content. aceMedia targets knowledge discovery and embedded self-adaptability to enable content to be self organising, self annotating, self associating; more readily searched (faster, more relevant results); and adaptable to user requirements (self reformatting). aceMedia introduces the novel concept of the Autonomous Content Entity (ACE), which has three layers: content, its associated metadata, and an intelligence layer consisting of distributed functions that enable the content to instantiate itself according to its context (e.g. network, user terminal, user preferences). The ACE may be created by a commercial content provider, to enable personalised self-announcement and automatic content collections, or may be created in a personal content system in order to make summaries of personal content, or automatically create personal albums of linked content. The ACE concept will be verified by two user focused application prototypes, enabled for both home network and mobile communication environments. This enables the aceMedia partners to evaluate the technical feasibility and user acceptance of the ACE concept, with a view to market exploitation after the end of the project.