Along with the emergence of high-speed communication technologies and protocols, tools for multimedia applications are growing in terms of their variety and their performance, making multimedia data flows candidates to the integration in almost every computer system. We particularly focus on the case of the factory plant where audio and video equipments could soon take part in the control/monitoring of manufacturing processes. Our paper presents a novel architecture for real time distributed systems using a 155.52 Mbit/s ATM network. The system is based on an intelligent network interface board, which integrates a processor and a field programmable gate array component to implement flexible high level communication protocols in an off-host implementation approach. We also propose a MMS-like multimedia application service element for the integrated services computer manufacturing system.