A new section on the newly owned Sony video property Grouper site [Hmm Grouper review] is offering ScreenBites of some 100 movies. The clips range from short to extremely short. Some arguably don’t even qualify as a bite, more like a nibble.

That’s what Sony said it is after with Grouper’s new “ScreenBites” channel. By offering famous scenes from hit films for free, Sony is hoping fans will be prompted to buy the full-length movie, the company said in a statement.

This is a step, albeit a very small one, in the right direction. Sony/Grouper should clearly offer the embed code like YouTube does instead of trying to post directly to the blog. Also, I don’t understand what’s going on with the existing videos I created and uploaded to Grouper. For the second time at least, my videos have disappeared from my Grouper profile.