As wireless technology evolves towards its fourth generation (4G) of development, the prospect of offering multimedia services such as on‐demand video streaming and video conferencing to wireless mobile clients becomes increasingly more viable. The eventual success of such applications depends on the efficient management of the limited system resources while taking into account the time‐varying wireless channel conditions as well as the varying multimedia source content. In this paper, we review some of the recent advances in cross‐layer design schemes, which aim at providing significant gains in performance for video streaming systems through content‐aware resource allocation. Advances in both, real‐time video streaming, where the video is encoded and transmitted in real‐time, as well as, on‐demand video streaming, where the video is pre‐encoded in a media server, are considered. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.