The use of multimedia data is growing at a rapid rate. Bringing multimedia services to terminals with limited capabilities such as limited bandwidths, and limited resolutions is a challenge to be dealt with. The features of these terminal devices generally vary in terms of storage capacity, memory, resolution, processing speed and bandwidth. Therefore an efficient scheme is required for adapting the multimedia content for delivery to the devices with limited resources. In this thesis we propose a novel distributed adaptation architecture suitable for resource-limited multimedia terminals as well as wired connections with high bandwidths. Here, the data is adapted at the proxy server as well as at the server (the processing load is distributed between the server and the proxy), resulting in a faster adaptation process. Most of the existing proxy based adaptation architectures do not exploit the cached data efficiently. A novel part of the proposed architecture is efficient use of the cached data at the proxy server. We propose a cache replacement policy for efficient cache management in the proxy. The proposed policy provides superior performance compared to other existing cache replacement policies. The proposed architecture is highly flexible and can be used both in mobile and wired networks eliminating the need and cost of building separate configurations for the two different networks.