The multiview video coding (MVC) adopts hierarchical B picture prediction structure and offers many prediction modes to effectively remove the spatial, temporal, and inter-view redundancies inherited in multiview video (MVV), but at the price of extremely high computational complexity. To address this problem, a fast MVC method by jointly using adaptive prediction structure (APS) and hierarchical mode decision (HMD) is proposed in this paper. The complexity reduction is achieved by: 1) designing four APSs for different MVV contents based on the fact that the contribution of the inter-view prediction varies from sequence to sequence and 2) developing an HMD scheme based on the observation that the relationship between the rate distortion (RD) cost and size of prediction mode is a unimodal function. In particular, for the current group of picture of the input MVV, the prediction structure is adaptively selected based on its characteristic, which is measured by the ratio of the average RD cost of the base view frames to the sum of the average RD cost of the base view frames and that of anchor frames in nonbase views, and then an HMD scheme is further performed to skip the checking process of those unlikely modes. The experimental results have shown that compared with the exhaustive mode decision in the MVC, the proposed algorithm achieves a reduction of the computational complexity by 83.49% on average, whereas incurring only a 0.086 dB loss in Bjontegaard delta peak signal-to-noise ratio and 2.97% increment on the total Bjontegaard delta bit rate.