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.
I thought that he was shooting the new Star Wars movies with the intention of all digital all of the way to the screens. It would save a tremendous amount of money in the distribution side. For example, it probably cost 30-50 million just to print all of those copies of Dark Knight to release to 4000 theaters.