Programming costs are so high today that even Comcast complains about the expense. What of small Internet service providers who lack the negotiating power of the nation's largest TV and broadband company?

Some of them are dropping channels or exiting the pay-TV business altogether, says a new article in The Wall Street Journal.

"I think the TV model is broken," BTC Broadband President Scott Floyd told the newspaper. BTC stopped offering TV late last year while continuing to sell Internet and phone service.

"The Oklahoma company, which had been serving about 420 TV subscribers, decided it simply couldn't afford to keep paying rising fees to carry a basic lineup of channels including ESPN, TNT, and MTV," the Journal wrote. Floyd "estimated that if the company continued to pass on rising programming costs to consumers and maintained its thin profit margins, by 2016 cable-TV bills would rise to $130 from about $60."

Small cable companies can increase their bargaining power by negotiating for programming rights in groups such as the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC), which negotiates on behalf of 950 companies. But small companies "representing about 53,000 customers have shut off cable-TV services or gone out of business" since 2008, with the trend accelerating in the past three years, the NCTC told the Journal.

Programming disputes are causing mid-size companies to drop channels as well. Suddenlink, a cable company with more than one million subscribers in Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia, dropped Viacom channels this week after claiming that Viacom demanded a nearly 50 percent increase in payments.

Viacom blamed Suddenlink for breaking off negotiations. Viacom told Ars in a statement that its channels, including Nickelodeon, MTV, and Comedy Central, "account for nearly 20 percent of all cable viewing" and "nearly a third of all video on demand viewing by Suddenlink customers." Suddenlink said viewership of Viacom channels was rapidly declining.

Customers are increasingly using online video in addition to or instead of traditional cable TV packages. But online video has become tied to cable packages in many cases, making it harder for customers to "cut the cord." The WatchESPN streaming service requires a pay-TV subscription, for example. But just having a pay-TV subscription doesn't guarantee access to ESPN streaming—your cable company has to pay ESPN both for the channels available on your cable box and for access to WatchESPN.

Cedar Falls Utilities in Iowa last month complained that ESPN channels just got more expensive because of "forced carriage of channels we don’t want," namely the SEC Network and Fusion.

"We’re telling you this because cable subscribers often ask why they can’t just buy the 12 or 15 channels they want, instead of a large bundle that includes dozens of networks they never watch," Cedar Falls marketing manager Betty Zeman wrote in a message to customers. "The answer is that bundling is created and enforced not by distributors like CFU, but by the handful of huge companies that own 90 percent of the channels you’ll find on any cable or satellite TV service."

The ESPN/Disney/ABC networks "are the priciest channels in your cable plan by a mile," Zeman wrote. When contracts expire, ESPN and other big programmers "often require us (and other distributors) to take one or more unwanted channels in order to keep carrying the most popular networks they own. And so the bundle gets bigger, even though that’s the last thing viewers or cable providers want."