ISO/IEC 23006-2:2016 specifies a set of Application Programming Interfaces (called for short MXM APIs) so that MPEG-M Applications running on an MPEG-M Device can access the standard multimedia technologies contained in its Middleware as MPEG-M Engines, as specified by ISO/IEC 23006-1.

The MXM APIs belong to two classes:

- the MPEG-M Engine APIs, i.e. the collection of the individual MPEG-M Engine APIs providing access to a single MPEG technology (e.g. video coding) or to a group of MPEG technologies where this is convenient;

- the MPEG-M Orchestrator API, i.e. the API of the special MPEG-M Engine (called Orchestrator Engine) that is capable of creating chains of MPEG-M Engines to execute high-level application calls such as "Play a video", as opposed to the typically low-level MPEG-M Engine API calls.