Multimedia systems deal with the generation, manipulation, storage, presentation, and communication of information in digital form.
The data may be in a variety of formats: text, graphics, images, audio, video.
A majority of this data is large and the different media may need synchronisation -- the data may have temporal relationships as an integral property.
Some media is time independent or static or discrete media: normal data, text, single images, graphics are examples.
Video, animation and audio are examples of continuous media.