In today’s fast paced world, the time available to watch long sports programmes is decreasing, while the number of sports channels is rapidly increasing. Many viewers desire the facility to watch just the highlights of sports events. This paper presents a simple, but effective, method for generating sports video highlights summaries. Our method detects semantically important events in sports programmes by using the Scale Factors in the MPEG audio bitstream to generate an audio amplitude profile of the program. The Scale Factors for the subbands corresponding to the voice bandwidth give a strong indication of the level of commentator and/or spectator excitement. When periods of sustained high audio amplitude have been detected and ranked, the corresponding video shots may be concatenated to produce a summary of the program highlights. Our method uses only the Scale Factor information that is directly accessible from the MPEG bitstream, without any decoding, leading to highly efficient computation. It is also rather more generic than many existing techniques, being particularly suitable for the more popular sports televised in Ireland such as soccer, Gaelic football, hurling, rugby, horse racing and motor racing.