The provision and support of new distributed multimedia services are of prime concern for telecommunications operators and suppliers. Clearly, the potential of the latest Internet protocols to contribute communications components is of considerable interest to them. In this paper we present three of the major new protocols introduced into the Internet environment to support real-time and multimedia communications. These are respectively IPv6 (the new version of the Internet protocol), RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol) and RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) with its control protocol RTCP. We then attempt to review these protocols critically in order to assess their suitability for purpose.