The new Miro Community service is a very cool way to create a free and easy video focused website. Creating a new site involves nothing more than signing up and selecting one or more videos to add to the site.
You can add videos from any number of sources, including YouTube of course, as well as from an embed code, RSS feeds or a direct link to a video you’ve found on the Web. This means you can aggregate favourite videos from all over the place to create exactly the video site you want. Amazingly powerful.
The service also gives you the power to accept and moderate comments on the videos, as well as allow members of the public to upload videos as they want (again with moderation). There’s a widget maker for embedding your top videos on other sites, a bookmarklet to make it easy to grab videos you come across while browsing and a full admin panel to make it super simple to manage and administer your content.
This is an absolutely awesome resource from the Miro open source people, and is bound to create a whole new genre of websites to add to blogs, galleries, shops and other specialist alternatives. Right now there’s only a small selection of 4 basic theme templates to use, but you can alter the page manually using CSS and image uploads all you want.
If you pay for the commercial version you’ll also be able to use your own custom domain and run advertising (there’s no news on pricing as yet) and there’s even a completely free open source version you can download and install on your own servers if you want. Amazing stuff.
I particularly love the Manage Sources tab in the admin section, where you can do a search for a video topic you like and then add videos you select from the results to your site to instantly create a niche video site for all to see. Genius idea. Lovely application.
Leverage Existing Video Your community already has a LOT of relevant video floating around on the internet. Miro Commnuity can aggregate it all in one central location. Videos can be created by you or your organization, but can also easily be brought in from a broader pool of creators. Videos can come from YouTube, blip.tv, Vimeo, or almost any video blog or site powered by drupal, plone, or other CMS that creates a media RSS feed.