Multimedia services and applications became the driving force in the development and widespread deployment of wireless broadband access technologies and high speed local area networks. Mobile phone service providers are offering wide range of multimedia applications over high speed wireless data networks. People can watch live TV, stream on-demand video clips and place videotelephony calls using multimedia capable mobile devices. Mobile devices will soon support capturing and displaying high definition video. Similar evolution is also occurring in the local area domain. The video receiver or storage devices were conventionally connected to display devices using cables. By using wireless local area networking (WLAN) technologies, convenient and cable-free connectivity can be achieved. Media over wireless home networks prevents the cable mess and provides mobility to portable TVs. However, there still exit challenges for improving the quality-of-service (QoS) of multimedia applications. Conventional service architectures, network structures and protocols lack to provide a robust distribution medium since most of them are not designed considering the high data rate and real-time transmission requirements of digital video. In this thesis the challenges of wireless video streaming are addressed in two main categories. Streaming protocol level issues constitute the first category. We will refer to the collection of network protocols that enable transmitting digital compressed video from a source to a receiver as the streaming protocol. The objective of streaming protocol solutions is the high quality video transfer between two networked devices. Novel application-layer video bit-rate adaptation methods are designed for handling short- and long-term bandwidth variations of the wireless local area network (WLAN) links. Both transrating and scalable video coding techniques are used to generate video bit-rate flexibility. Another contribution of this thesis study is an error control method that dynamically adjusts the forward error correction (FEC) rate based on channel bit-error rate (BER) estimation and video coding structure. The second category is the streaming service level issues, which generally surface in large scale systems. Service system solutions target to achieve system scalability and provide low cost / high quality service to consumers. Peer-to-peer assisted video streaming technologies are developed to reduce the load of video servers. Novel video file segment caching strategies are proposed for more efficient peer-to-peer collaboration.