This paper describes the design and implementation of a component based distributed multimedia application that was developed to investigate a new design principle for resource-efficient layered system architectures. In order to provide flexible and adaptable application scenarios, different applications are composed from four basic generic component types. Combining different component types with different types of interaction and locating them on different nodes of a distributed system then results in large distributed multimedia applications where each application has different types of sophisticated resource requirements. Beyond the scope of our test-bed we believe that this component-based architecture is well suited for general large scale streaming media applications such as video-conferencing and video on demand services.