This PhD thesis examines developing a scalable media delivery chain with distributed adaptation. The objectives are to evaluate Scalable Video Coding (SVC) encoding, develop guidelines for SVC streaming, investigate SVC tunneling for device-independent access, analyze scalability features for content-aware delivery, and investigate distributed adaptation in networks. The thesis outlines SVC encoding evaluations, hybrid SVC-DASH streaming, SVC tunneling concepts and tests, and an end-to-end adaptive streaming system with distributed adaptation.