According to Japanese financial newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Sony Computer Entertainment, the same division that develops the Playstation line of products and computer games, has plans to produce digital movies as early as 2002.

The newspaper states that Sony has approached George Lucas and other directors to helm the digital movies that would be distributed over high-speed Internet connections for the upcoming Playstation 2. It is hardly surprising the company intents to make George Lucas their predominant spokesperson in the segment, since he has been a long-time supporter of digital filmmaking and is planning to shoot most of “Star Wars: Episode II” using digital cameras from Sony and Panavision.

At the same time it makes clear however, that Sony has definite plans to remove Playstation from its separate video game segment. The inclusion of DVD Video abilities, and Dolby Digital and DTS optical outputs in the upcoming “Playstation 2”, and now content delivery over the Internet, will make the console an interactive rival to existing DVD player generations.