Forthcoming generations of wireless systems (4G and beyond) promise revolutionary growth in the achievable data rates of wireless services and in the diversity and flexibility of these services. These systems are expected to support data rates compatible with multimedia applications and to guarantee the QoS requirements of these applications. Despite recent advances in this area, enabling continuous media streaming over wireless channels is still fraught with challenges. On the one hand, the available bandwidth of a wireless link fluctuates significantly as a result of channel fading and interference. On the other hand, video applications impose tight throughput and jitter requirements, particularly for interactive communications. The situation is further aggravated by the contention-based nature of common wireless access techniques, which gives rise to packet collisions. Collisions can result in packet erasures, whose impact on video quality may extend to several interdependent frames. Our general goal in this project is to provide a framework for joint operation and optimal adaptation of various system controls, including source coding (e.g., rate scaling), channel coding and modulation, error concealment, playback-rate adjustment, and prefetching (when possible), with the aim of probabilistically guaranteeing a certain quality of media streaming.