More than 20 cable systems across Kansas will be terminating television and broadband service after a private equity firm, working with former Bresnan Cable executives, deemed them unprofitable and not worth upgrading.

Residents of Conway Springs (pop. 1,250), Chetopa (1,125), Sharon (158), and Harper (1,473) are among those who will find their cable and broadband service discontinued in the coming weeks. Abandoned cable subscribers are being told to buy satellite dishes to continue watching television. No immediate broadband solution was available.

Allegiance Communications, which provides cable TV, broadband Internet, and VOIP telephony services to rural and mid-size markets in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas was acquired last month by former executives at Bresnan Communications, itself bought out by Cablevision Industries. The deal was largely financed by BBH Capital Partners, a New York City-based private equity firm.

The purchase by BCI Broadband orphaned nearly two dozen cable systems that Allegiance owned and operated, but were excluded from the sale. Subscribers are being notified they are about to be switched off permanently in letters signed by Allegiance executives.

Several former Bresnan Cable executives are behind BCI Broadband.

The service will leave rural Kansans without broadband service, cable television, or an alternative to AT&T and other independent phone companies operating in the state.

“This was not an easy decision for us, nor is it one that we came to hastily. The costs of doing business in Conway Springs can no longer be profitable,” Allegiance wrote in its letter, according to KSNW-TV.

Local officials in affected communities are rushing to find an alternative, appealing to providers like Southern Kansas Telephone to see if they can pick up where Allegiance left off, but the phone company has yet to respond.

Allegiance claims the outdated cable systems served few subscribers and the new owners were not interested in investing funds to upgrade them.

BCI Broadband is a new company run by former executives forced out of Bresnan Communications when the company was sold to Cablevision. BCI Broadband claims it wants to invest in system upgrades to improve service to remaining subscribers.

“Historically when we have purchased cable systems and invested in upgrading to the latest technology in markets like Shawnee, that has inevitably led to more customers and the need for more staff,” said Shawn Beqaj, vice president of public and government affairs for BCI Broadband. Beqaj was the former vice president of public affairs at Bresnan.

There has been an accelerating trend of industry consolidation among rural cable operators, particularly by private equity firms that are interested in the stable earnings cable operators usually generate.

GTCR, through its portfolio company Rural Broadband Investments LLC , separately announced its plans to acquire NewWave Communications Co., in what it hopes is just the first of a series of acquisitions. NewWave’s purchase was financed by debt capital from SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc., and Goldman Sachs Bank USA.

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KSNW-TV reports more than 20 Kansas communities will lose television and broadband service when Allegiance Communications switches off the cable systems. (2 minutes)

Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt warned programmers in early December that low-rated cable channels were at risk of being dropped from the second-largest cable operator in the country.

Ovation and Current TV now understand he meant it.

Customers are now being notified that the cable company has dropped both networks. Most customers will never notice the loss — only about 1% of Time Warner customers, around 33,000 nationwide — watched Ovation last month and about as many parked their remotes on Current TV.

Time Warner Cable released a statement explaining escalating programming costs are forcing the company to closely assess each network as it comes due for renewal. The cable company called Ovation one of the worst performing networks on its lineup. It was more abrupt about Current. The company claimed it dropped the network simply because “it was sold.”

Several weeks ago, Britt hinted networks that began offering one type of programming but shifted to another in a bid to win more viewers are especially vulnerable to being dropped. Britt appeared to be thinking about Ovation, which calls itself a cultural fine arts channel but last month devoted 70 percent of its schedule to infomercials, reruns from TV networks that hardly qualify as “fine arts,” and endless repeats of PBS’ ‘Antiques Roadshow.’ For this kind of programming, Time Warner Cable has paid Ovation $10 million over the past several years.

Ovation has gotten 25,000 signatures on its petition drive to try and convince Time Warner Cable to bring the network back to its lineup.

“They’ve had ample opportunity to improve the ratings and the content, and have failed to deliver,” Time Warner said in a statement.

Current TV, which was partly founded by former Vice President Al Gore as a broadcast home for viewer generated content (think YouTube on the airwaves) has always turned in dismal viewership numbers. More recently, the channel has shifted its format, airing a variety of liberal political talk radio and television shows deemed too left-wing for MSNBC, which has helped win the network some additional viewers, but not in every case. Disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, formerly with CNN, has a TV show on Current he admits doesn’t draw flies.

“Nobody’s watching, but I’m having a great time,” Spitzer said.

On Wednesday, the network announced it was acquired by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, a kiss of death for most mainstream cable systems that are still unwilling to carry programming from a network the Bush Administration came close to calling ‘with the terrorists.’

Time Warner Cable dropped the network from its lineup the moment the sale was announced.

Current TV intends to gradually rebrand itself as Al Jazeera America, with a 24-hour English language news and information format. Al Jazeera has won respect for its international news coverage, but continues to be saddled with the perception it has a subtle anti-American bias.

But not every network with low viewer numbers is at immediate risk of being placed on Time Warner’s chopping block.

The Kremlin’s subtle hands of influence have kept RT — Russia Today — closely aligned with Vladimir Putin’s policies as relations cool between Moscow and Washington. But that network remains on the Time Warner Cable lineup.

The new owner of Current TV.

One thing all threatened networks have in common is that they are independently owned and operated and are not a part of a much larger network or studio conglomerate. That makes them low-hanging fruit for cable operators to pick off because the owners lack leverage to force renewal.

Fox Business Network, which has continuously turned in abysmal numbers since its inception is a case in point. Despite often having fewer than 15,000 viewers in its target demographic, it safely maintains its place on Time Warner Cable’s lineup because it was included in a carriage agreement deal that bundled the much larger Fox News Channel. As long as Time Warner agrees to contracts that tie the fate of both networks together, Fox Business Network will have a home on the cable system even if nobody watches.

With the writing on the wall, other low-rated networks have responded by easing their hard-line tactics at contract renewal time. The parent owner of IFC and WEtv have agreed to a temporary contract extension as the two networks fight to remain on Time Warner’s lineup. Hallmark TV and Hallmark Movie Channel may be in a similar position soon enough.

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Here today, gone tomorrow.

Cablevision West, formerly known as Bresnan Communications, has been up for sale for weeks, and at least three major cable operators have submitted bids to acquire its 300,000 customers in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.

Cablevision bought Bresnan Communications in 2010 for $1.37 billion. The cable operator invested millions updating the cable properties in the mountain west, but ultimately decided the more rural cable systems were too far away from its hometown systems in densely populated suburban New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Selling Cablevision West would improve Cablevision’s balance sheet and allow the company to concentrate on its highly competitive home territory in the northeast, where Verizon FiOS frequently competes.

Among the three vying for Cablevision West, Charter Communications seems to be the best positioned to win. Charter already operates cable systems in the central and western United States, mostly in smaller cities and rural areas. Former Cablevision CEO Thomas Rutledge was in charge when Cablevision bought Bresnan Communications, and in his new role as CEO of Charter, he told CNBC he still admires those western systems.

Suddenlink has attained deeper pockets after its acquisition earlier this year by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, European private equity firm BC Partners and the cable operator’s current management. With money to spend, Suddenlink Communications could find itself the highest bidder. Suddenlink currently serves over 1.4 million residential and commercial customers, primarily in Texas, West Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Time Warner Cable, the second-largest U.S. cable provider, is also among the stingiest of the three bidders. CEO Glenn Britt has consistently told investors the company will not engage in bidding wars or overpay for acquisition opportunities. The company has passed on several earlier opportunities for cable systems up for sale, although it did successfully acquire Insight Communications earlier this year.

The winner will likely be announced as early as January and then customers will have to prepare, once again, for another owner to take control.

Montreal-based Cogeco Cable has announced it is acquiring Atlantic Broadband, a cable operator serving small communities in Pennsylvania, Florida, Maryland, Delaware and South Carolina for $1.36 billion, raising investor fears the company is once again on a spending spree.

Cogeco’s tarnished record of cable acquisitions was highlighted last year when it was forced to write off almost $250 million in losses racked up by its Portuguese acquistion Cabovisao. The company finally sold the money-losing operation at a loss in February.

Cogeco stock plummeted more than 17 percent on today’s news, and investors are concerned Cogeco’s entry into the U.S. market is competitively risky.

Atlantic Broadband’s cable systems were acquired from Charter Communications in 2003. Charter was consolidating its operations into larger markets, and the systems along the eastern seaboard were deemed too small to create the kind of large, regional clusters cable operators prefer today. Atlantic only serves around 252,000 customers nationwide, almost all in smaller communities and cities. That mirrors the way Cogeco operates in Ontario and Quebec — primarily in smaller cities bypassed by larger operators Rogers Cable and Vidéotron.

Cogeco CEO Louis Audet believes growth opportunities in Canada are limited at best. He defended the acquisition as an entry point in the United States, signaling Cogeco was going to continue shopping for other small U.S. cable operators.

Cogeco is paying about $5,400 per subscriber, according to Bloomberg News. That compares with $4,418 Time Warner Cable paid per subscriber for Insight Communications, and $5,486 for each Knology customer acquired by WideOpenWest LLC.

Cogeco acquired Atlantic Broadband from private-equity firms Abry Partners and Oak Hill Capital Partners.

Shaw Communications executives last week announced, to the relief of Wall Street, the cable company is pulling back on great deals for cable TV, Internet and phone service this summer.

In an effort to appease Wall Street analysts like Phillip Huang, a researcher for UBS Investment Bank — who fear lower prices could “spiral into a price war, which obviously would be a lose, lose situation,” Shaw has made it clear it intends to stop some of its most aggressive promotions this summer.

“When you talk about promotions in the market, we’ve been very disciplined in that regard,” Shaw executives told analysts on last week’s quarterly results conference call. “It’s a highly competitive environment and will continue to be that way and we’re going to operate in a certain fashion.”

That “certain fashion” has cost them at least 21,500 subscribers who have already left Shaw this past quarter, most headed to Shaw’s biggest competitor Telus.

But some Wall Street analysts remain unsatisfied, noting there are major differences in telecommunications pricing in Canada. Western Canadians pay substantially less for phone, cable, and broadband service than their counterparts in Ontario and Quebec. Shaw and Telus customers also have much larger usage allowances for broadband service, and Telus so far has not enforced what limits they have.

Analysts peppered Shaw executives about why they are not raising prices to match what Bell, Rogers, and Vidéotron customers further east are paying.

Jay Mehr, Shaw’s senior vice president of operations told investors to hang in there.

“We still believe that we have some good pricing power when discipline really comes back into this market,” Mehr said on the call with investors. That signals Shaw is prepared to raise prices when aggressive deals end.

Wall Street also questioned why the company does not use long-term contracts to lock customers in place:

Mehr

Glen Campbell – BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division: […] On service contracts: You’ve been pretty firm in not using them. Your competitor clearly does. […] Can you talk about the reasons for not going down the service contract road and whether you might reconsider that position?

Bradley S. Shaw – Shaw Communications: Well, there’s arguments for contracts as you — I guess, it’s really what these contracts do. As you said, we have equipment. Our [indiscernible] space — our Easy Own plan certainly is a very consumer-friendly plan as customers are getting something, and they’re agreeing to pay for it over time. And that creates kind of a natural kind of a relationship. What we don’t want to have happen is having customers, who are feeling confined by a contract, who otherwise would like to do something else. We don’t think that’s consumer-friendly. And so we’re looking at ways that we’d have more consumer-friendly kind of relationships but that still create some kind of a longer-term relationship that you can count on. But we don’t want to have the ball and chain kind of contracts that others have adopted.

[…] From a customer point of view. But also, the nature of contracts is there needs to be an enticement to get the customer sign a contract, and that enticement tends to be what we’re seeing in the market, which is fairly significant giveaways of hardware and other devices to be able to incent that. And so it will have has an impact on your cost of acquisition, and we’re trying to manage that. As Peter said, our Easy Own program is a very customer-friendly way for people to come on and make a commitment to us. And at the end of the period, they own their equipment. They haven’t had to pay upfront, and so it’s a nice way to manage that without being heavy-handed.

Shaw’s Exo Wi-Fi service is coming soon across western Canada.

Some other developments at Shaw, reported during the conference call:

• Spending on upgrades will continue to be on the aggressive side as the company builds out its new Exo Wi-Fi network and converts cable systems to digital service, creating additional space for broadband speed increases and other services;
• Broadband delivers the highest profit margins of all of Shaw’s services, so it remains a very important part of Shaw’s package;
• Customers are gravitating towards higher speed broadband packages, delivering extra revenue;
• The company has re-priced some of its plans and offers to be more friendly to broadband-only customers;
• Shaw is working to gain approval from communities across western Canada to deploy its Wi-Fi network, with plans to begin limited promotion of the new service by late fall or early 2013. Shaw expects its Wi-Fi network to have substantial coverage across the region within three years;
• Shaw plans to work with U.S. cable operators to participate in a Wi-Fi roaming network that will allow its customers access to the Wi-Fi networks being built in the United States;
• Shaw’s “TV Everywhere” project is being designed to protect existing video revenue. Rights are being acquired across the board for broadband, tablets and other mobile devices for a robust on-demand service. But live streaming is secondary.