Abstract - Multimedia technology is making an inroad into the home via a variety of applications, such as digital set-top boxes, Internet appliances, and videophones. Looking at just these few examples, it seems not only conceivable that the average household will have several multimedia appliances, it seems likely. The already large and still growing number of standards in this field calls for a programmable solution. However, the price-performance of mainstream programmable processors is off by an order of magnitude for consumer markets. In this paper, we discuss the trade offs to get to an optimal price performance point for media processing, based on experience with the TriMedia processor design.