This work addresses the development of a computational model of visual attention to perform the automatic summarization of digital videos from television archives. Although the television system represents one of the most fascinating media phenomena ever created, we still observe the absence of effective solutions for content-based information retrieval from video recordings of programs produced by this media universe. This fact relates to the high complexity of the content-based video retrieval problem, which involves several challenges, among which we may highlight the usual demand on video summaries to facilitate indexing, browsing and retrieval operations. To achieve this goal, we propose a new computational visual attention model, inspired on the human visual system and based on computer vision methods (face detection, motion estimation and saliency map computation), to estimate static video abstracts, that is, collections of salient images or key frames extracted from the original videos. Experimental results with videos from the Open Video Project show that our approach represents an effective solution to the problem of automatic video summarization, producing video summaries with similar quality to the ground-truth manually created by a group of 50 users.