Abstract: Today’s increasing variety of media data results in a great diversity of XML metadata, which describes the media data on semantic or syntactic levels, in order to make it more accessible to the user. This metadata can be of considerable size, which leads to problems in streaming scenarios. Other than media data, XML metadata has no concept of “samples”, thus inhibiting streamed (and timed) processing, which is natural for media data. In order to address the challenges and requirements resulting from this situation, the concept of streaming instructions is introduced. In particular, streaming instructions address the problem of fragmenting metadata, associating media segments and metadata fragments, and streaming and processing them in a synchronized manner. This is achieved by enriching the metadata with additional attributes to describe media and XML properties. Alternatively, a style sheet approach provides the opportunity to dynamically set such streaming properties without actually modifying the XML description.