Cloud computing is an emerging technology developed for providing various computing and storage services over the Internet. In this paper, we proposed a privacy-preserving cloud-aware scenario for compressive multimedia applications, including multimedia compression, adaptation, editing/manipulation, enhancement, retrieval, and recognition. In the proposed framework, we investigate the applicability of our/existing compressive sensing (CS)-based multimedia compression and securely compressive multimedia “trans-sensing” techniques based on sparse coding for securely delivering compressively sensed multimedia data over a cloud-aware scenario. Moreover, we also investigate the applicability of our/existing sparse coding-based frameworks for several multimedia applications by leveraging the strong capability of a media cloud. More specifically, to consider several fundamental challenges for multimedia cloud computing, such as security and network/device heterogeneities, we investigate the applications of CS and sparse coding techniques in multimedia delivery and applications. As a result, we can build a unified cloud-aware framework for privacy-preserving multimedia applications via sparse coding.