Wasn't this pushed by George Lucas and ILM? I know they were wanting to push in that direction, and it will definitely cut the costs of distribution.
Yeah, after George paid for his study of film handling and projection in the theater industry, the study that eventually lead to the curved screens. Basically once he quantified just how badly theaters were mishandling prints and how horribly they were scratching them in just a few days (I think his study declared most films unwatchable after 3 days) he proposed an electronic transmission to theaters largely to keep the films watchable into the second week of release. Of course at the time nobody thought terabyte harddrives would be purchasable at your nearest electronics store so the idea of storing movies on central harddrives for scheduled transmissions seemed silly. What a difference a couple decades make.