There was a lot of plastic stamped out, and there was a round-the-clock distribution system for shipping those pieces of plastic to middle men distributors and stores before they got to you. There's a huge maintenance cost to these cloud services, but there's plenty of evidence that the environmental cost of that maintenance is much lower than the cost of those DVDs.

Is it perfect? No, I'd much rather that a county-or-state library system run the media library and have set of servers and data that were shared and archived and synced with the library of congress. It is by no means more expensive, in terms of cash, middlemen or natural resources, for digital delivery the way that's currently going on over buying DVDs.