Abstract Although video summarization has achieved great success in recent years, few approaches have realized the in- fluence of video structure on the summarization results. As we know, the video data follow a hierarchical structure, i.e., a video is composed of shots, and a shot is composed of several frames. Generally, shots provide the activity-level information for people to understand the video content. While few existing summarization approaches pay attention to the shot segmentation procedure. They generate shots by some trivial strategies, such as fixed length segmentation, which may destroy the underlying hierarchical structure of video data and further reduce the quality of generated summaries. To address this problem, we propose a structureadaptive video summarization approach that integrates shot segmentation and video summarization into a Hierarchical Structure-Adaptive RNN, denoted as HSA-RNN. We evaluate the proposed approach on four popular datasets, i.e., SumMe, TVsum, CoSum and VTW. The experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of HSA-RNN in the video summarization task