There is a digital revolution happening right before our eyes, the way we communicate is rapidly changing dues to rapid technological advances. Pencil and paper communication is drastically reducing and being replaced with newer communication medium ranging from emails to sms/mms and other instant messaging services. Information/news used to be broadcasted only through official and dedicated channels such as television, radio or newspapers. The technology available today allows every single one of us to be individual information broadcasters whether through text, image or video using our personal connected mobile device. In effect, the current trend shows that video will soon become the most important media on the Internet. While the amount of multimedia content continuously increases there is still progress to be done for automatically understanding multimedia documents in order to provide means to index, search and browse them more effectively. The objectives of this chapter are three-fold. First, we will motivate multimedia content modeling research in the current technological context. Secondly, a broad state of the art will provide the reader with a brief overview of the methodological trends of the field. Thirdly, a bird eye view of the various research themes I have supervised and/or conducted will be presented and will expose how contextual information has become an important additional source of information for multimedia content understanding.