The Internet architecture and protocols have been extremely successful in recent decades due to their simplicity and scalability with best effort services. The applications were Web-based and contained limited multimedia content. The support for digital media is one of the fastest growing requirements of the Internet as demand transitions from services designed for text and images to those intended to support high quality streaming multimedia. The optical networks are the principal actor to satisfy this requirement. Looking at the near future, emerging network applications are sensitive to latency, jitter, loss rate, and/or flow completion time. Unlike today’s web applications, the new ones are expected to be more complex and to serve a larger number of consumers, pursuing an automatic management and optimization of the service degradation.