This paper presents FAETHON, a distributed information system that offers enhanced search and retrieval capabilities to users interacting with digital audiovisual (a/v) archives. Its novelty primarily originates in the unified intelligent access to heterogeneous a/v content. The paper emphasizes on the features that provide enhanced search and retrieval capabilities to users, as well as intelligent management of the a/v content by content creators / distributors. It describes the system’s main components, the intelligent metadata creation package, the a/v search engine & portal, and the MPEG-7 compliant a/v archive interfaces. Finally, it provides ideas on the positioning of FAETHON in the market of a/v archives and video indexing and retrieval.