A system facilitates and enhances review of one or more multimedia input streams that includes some combination of video, audio and text information, generating a multimedia summary, thereby enabling a user to better browse and/or decide on viewing the multimedia input streams in their entirety. The multimedia summary is constructed automatically, based in part on system specifications, user specifications and network and device constraints. In a particular application of the invention, the input multimedia streams represent news broadcasts (e.g., television news program, video vault footage). In such a particular application, the invention can enable the user to automatically receive a summary of the news stream in accordance with previously provided user preferences and in accordance with prevailing network and user device constraints.