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Streaming is also bad for the planet, it needs a ton of servers which all need energy to run and produce emissions. I don't have figures to mind right now but it wasn't nothing. I'm not sure how it compares to distribution though.

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It is much cheaper. A server can easily handle hundreds to thousands of simultaneous streams. Even if the server is requiring 1kW of power for that, it makes a worst case of 10W per client. Maybe double it if you want to count in the datacenter overhead (like AC), but realistically Netflix is doing more like 4 digits of concurrent streams than 3 digits, so 10W as an upper bound feel wrong.

That's less than an end users TV will utilize, and it's probably also less than a standalone DVD player requires.

You're not counting the energy costs of producing the DVD's, shipping, storage and all the people involved who have to travel to work etc.

Or energy costs of producing hardware to serve from, buildings to house those servers, ship them around, replace and fix them, cool them down...

It is likely still more efficient to stream than ship on DVDs (I wonder how much it changes with eg. USB flash drives, SD cards or other rewriteable media), but have upfront energy costs that are harder to estimate.

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