This week, our friends over at Participatory Culture Foundation debuted a new video presentation site, Miro Community. In addition to providing simple and convenient access to diverse video content from anywhere on the web, it creates a unique, personalized video site in minutes. Best of all, it is free to create a site (and it’s open source, so you can host your own).

Miro Community tackles two fundamental issues facing online video—the navigation of content dispersed all over the web, and the difficulty for less tech savvy producers to establish their own attractive video site. Audiences and creators know all too well the hassle of searching unsuccessfully for a video or maintaining unified video content across a growing number of popular hosting platforms.

With Miro Community, creators can display all their videos in one location, even if those videos come from a variety of sites like YouTube, Blip, Vimeo, or are self-hosted elsewhere. Users and organizations can create their own website and pull together already existing content and add new videos. Visitors can comment, view administrator curated playlists, or submit a video that they think is worth adding to the collection.

For universities, this might provide more professional web front-end than either iTunes or YouTube for open courseware and related materials. For public broadcasting affiliates, it could mean a free, accessible location for digitally distributed content. In terms of presentation, the site gives video the spotlight and because it is ad-free, there are no unwanted promos to distract from the viewing experience.

Miro Community has issued a call to partner with local and public media organizations, so if you’d like to see your company get involved, be sure to check them out. In the meantime, give your own Miro Community site a try.