Abstract
In order to offer advanced multimedia services over the Internet, including the field of Cultural Heritage, the delivery networks have to evolve just like the multimedia services demand evolves every day. The current transmission networks are not able of supporting bandwidth requirements for new multimedia services. The paper introduces the Next Generation Networks (NGNs) from a technical point of view, providing the key concepts to understand in which direction the existing data networks will evolve. After presenting the procedures for implementing the NGNs, the paper focuses the improvements offered by the NGNs in terms of high bandwidth capacity and low latency, showing what classes of multimedia services will benefit from these platform and which kind of innovative multimedia services may be useful for Cultural Heritage diffusion and preservation.