1. A method for producing a multimedia summary of at least one multimedia stream the summary comprising key elements selected from said at least one multimedia stream, the method comprising: a.) one of receiving and retrieving said at least one multimedia stream comprising video, audio and text information; b.) dividing the at least one multimedia stream into a video substream, an audio sub-stream and a text sub-stream; c.) identifying for potential inclusion in the summary video, audio and text key elements from said video, audio and text sub-streams, respectively; d.) computing an importance value for the identified video, audio and text key elements identified at said step (c); e.) first filtering the identified video, audio and text key elements to exclude those key elements whose associated importance value is less than a pre-defined video, audio and text importance threshold, respectively; and f.) second filtering the remaining key elements from said step (e) in accordance with a user profile; g.) third filtering the remaining key elements from said step (f) in accordance with network and user device constraints; and h.) outputting a multimedia summary which comprises key elements remaining from said step (g).
6. The method of claim 1 , wherein the act of identifying video, audio and text key elements from said video, audio and text sub-streams further comprise the acts of: 1.) identifying low, mid and high level features from the plurality of frames which comprise said video, audio and text, substreams; 2.) determining an importance value to each of said extracted low, mid and high level features from said identifying act; 3.) computing a frame importance value for each of said plurality of frames which comprise said video, audio and text sub-streams as a function of the importance values of the feature importance values determined at said determining act; 4.) combining the frames into segments in each of said video, audio and text sub-streams; 5.) computing an importance value per segment for each segment from said combining act; 6.) ranking the segments based on said computed importance value at said computing step; and 7.) identifying key elements based on said ranked segments.