We present the development and experimentation of a distributed system for pervasive video communication on gigabit networks. We have implemented an event-based control mechanism for the management of video sensors and their flexible dynamic configuration based on a service discovery protocol. Tests have shown that distributed acquisition of video content can be achieved with good performance by using this architecture on a high capacity network with, however, a strong dependence on the quality of the underlying networking hardware (Gigabit switches),specifically the capability of handling jumbo frames. The experiments have also validated our distributed architecture for composing complex scenes from distributed video sensors.