Ten or 15 years ago, as record companies were dropping orchestras right and left, classical music argued that the culprit was the delivery system. It wasn't that audiences didn't want their Brahms and Ligeti anymore, but that "greedy" recording companies, having tasted the instant profit gratification of pop music, were no longer willing to record orchestras only to wait around for the slow-simmer sales of classical.

Now the middleman has been cut out, and orchestras and opera companies are bringing themselves directly to the customer. Yet classical is still scrambling to recapture something resembling its former marketplace presence. It seems unlikely that TV networks, big-city newspapers, and department stores will ever achieve the hegemony they held until the end of the last century, but orchestras - seemingly in the same dinosaur category - keep dreaming.

The Metropolitan Opera has been the most successful performing-arts provider in attracting large, engaged audiences with movie-theater broadcasts that afford views logistically impossible in person. Now the Berlin Philharmonic is going the way of intimacy, with the small screen.

This season, for the first time, the orchestra is streaming all its programs live or archived via www.berliner-philharmoniker.de, and it's a safe bet the successes and failures of the venture will help form media blueprints for the future of orchestras everywhere.

The season opened last Friday night (or, for us, afternoon). It's extremely seductive, this idea that at 12:20 one could be bringing in tomatoes and basil from the back patio, at 12:35 eating lunch, and at 12:59 sitting with Simon Rattle in Berlin's Philharmonie.

That's not quite what happened, though. I made three or four attempts to hear Friday's concert of Britten, Saariaho, and Berlioz, and in fact did hear the concert, but only as it dribbled out 10 or 12 bars at a time. Then the frame would seize up until the next few seconds could be digested.

Figuring the technical issues were on my end, I decamped to a coffee shop, but by the time I did the concert was over, and as of yesterday morning the performance wasn't yet available.

What I could find in the archive of the Digital Concert Hall, however, was pure gold: a program from May with Claudio Abbado leading music from Schubert's Rosamunde, Mahler songs with mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager, and Debussy's La Mer.

The Philharmonic didn't capture all its concerts last season, but this one shows an orchestra doing everything right. The camera work (look - an Asian female trombonist!), the cutting (nothing sudden or artsy), the audio (crystalline and balanced) are all handled deftly. The focus is always on the music. I found the close-ups of an elderly Abbado deeply moving; we can count on never seeing him conduct in Philadelphia again, but here he is - as potent as in his prime. The orchestra came across as the perfection machine it is in person.

The price of access seems like neither a bargain nor an extravagance: 149 euros ($213) gets you in for the season; a 30-day pass comes to about $56; single performances (live or archived) are just under $15.

How customers use these concerts - where they listen to them; for what purpose (as background music or as feature attraction); what the attention span is for this kind of experience - is as critical to the success of the project as how smartly the Philharmonic's producers are doing their jobs. The answers will have to play out over time. I can tell you that a coffee shop, with its ambient music and social interruptions, isn't ideal.

It seems likely that the Berlin Philharmonic's move onto the Web with a season this complete and captivating signals the beginning of a consolidation of the orchestral world, at least to some degree. Will listeners in Pasadena, Charlotte, Minneapolis, and Cherry Hill decide that it's cheaper, more convenient, and more musically satisfying to hear and see the Berlin Philharmonic on the Internet than to continue to attend local concerts?

Is this a viable proxy for the real thing?

For some, yes. Listeners attend their orchestras, whether the Chicago Symphony or Symphony in C, for all kinds of reasons - for the social scene, the feeling of being part of an event, to hear specific repertoire, to support the city. My hunch is that the Philharmonic Web concerts will take a small but important bite out of the U.S. live-orchestra listenership.

If audiences have all kinds of reasons for going to the orchestra, they also have all kinds of reasons for not going. For some it's too expensive. Others have grown complacent after repeated encounters with soloists and conductors they perceive as insufficiently starry or individualistic. Some have too many other distractions, and the act of sitting captive in a concert hall - stripped of choice, bereft of texting for two whole hours - feels somehow culturally out of sync.

The largest segment of the non-orchestra-going public is the growing group that didn't have classical music forming in their consciousness growing up. These generations are probably irretrievable.

For an increasing slice, the orchestra is a place for watching. This "listener" likes to see the hands of the piano soloist, the face of the conductor, the fingers of the clarinetist. The Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall gives them a playground of stimulation, with cameras perched (like the Met broadcasts) all around the concert hall.

And then there are the aficionados. Small but vocal, this is the listener willing to pay $213 a year to leave the local orchestra behind for more satisfying, if remote, orchestral playing. Now he or she can assess the Philharmonic-Rattle rapport firsthand, gauge how well flutist Emmanuel Pahud fits into an orchestral context (as opposed to his other life as soloist), and get news from the compositional front with the latest Saariaho work.

All of a sudden, Berlin beckons. A wall has fallen, and no void has ever echoed more sonorously.

Next Concert

The Berlin Philharmonic's next Digital Concert Hall performance is Sept. 9. Sir Simon Rattle will conduct Haydn's The Seasons at 2 p.m. Philadelphia time.

Information: www.berliner-philharmoniker.de.

Contact music critic Peter Dobrin at 215-854-5611 or pdobrin@phillynews.com. Read his blog at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/artswatch.