Ya know... the movie studios seem to be a lot less vindictive and vengeful than the music studios. Perhaps movie studios don't feel as threatened, because movies take a lot more time to download. HD, in particular, and there's the storage & playback issues. Perhaps also, because you can rent movies, and tv broadcasters play everything, while radio typically only plays certain cuts of music... Also, people buy as much music as they can afford. But they buy as many dvds as they have space for...
Also, everybody has a several dozen new (and older) movies/shows, per year, to think about choosing. But "fanatics" can be counted on to buy their "cult films". (And, they will never admit, the general population is more likely to choose a "cult film/show", per-purchase-decision, than one of the yearly flood of yeah-that's-nice films). So they have to strategize for how they exploit, errr, abuse, err, relate to the "fringe" who generate those insane sales figures on certain titles. (Deleted a lot more rambling).
Most HD distributors try to stay fairly anonymous... Kinda hard to pin down the line for paranoia. Especially with the special circumstances of Lucas*. Limited distribution, of the HD, might be a good idea. Especially if it's ready before he releases his non-OUT Blu-Rays.
Brings up another subject, though...
One-upmanship is a game of increments.
Lucas defeated the community's laserdisc rips's video with the crappiest source in his vaults. And one can easily imagine that he howled with laughter, as he pulled it out of the vault. Then, perhaps to to rub it in, he gave it an even-worse-mastering than his other OT DVDs (not that his PT dvds were mastered all that well).
Our answer was going to be the X0 (less detail, but wayyy better PQ)... I'm sure he, and people of his, read these forums. And, if this is oneupmanship, they may've made plans.
This transfer could make an SD DVD release that would beat the snot out of the GOUT, SE, Super-SE, ultra duper hyper... A general release of that wouldn't be pushing too far into strange waters...
Of couse we couldn't talk specifics, in the forums, about hey-it's-being-distributed-this-way-now, when it's happening, but still. (Some of the rules may not seem intuitively obvious, but there is a logic to them).
So, anyway, supposing, there's an SD version, swimming around freely... and they know that, somewhere, out there, lurks an HD version (that would be easy for them to one-up, of course). Will it surface? When? Should they transfer a 16mm? A 35mm print? An interneg? A sep neg? A techicolor? Should they pay for the transfer now? Heheh, let 'em sweat... :-}