As seen at Robert's (who is the "R" in RACS and thus plugs into "the industry"):

There is also a lot of speculation around the web that ADV simply lost the R1 license and Bandai then jumped on it. This is certainly plausible, however, I would forward another theory. Perhaps ADV sold the license to Bandai in order to raise much needed capital. ADV was in quite a pinch financially back in February, and Gurren Lagann was arguably one of their most valuable unreleased properties. In business when you need to raise money fast in tough times, sometimes you have to sell off your highest quality assets because it's all your competitors will buy quickly and pay up for. I would also speculate that by selling the license to Bandai it would have kept it out of Funimations or Viz's hands. Funimation is the absolute dominant player in the market now and they have the big corporate backing of Navarre Corp., and Viz has been extremely successful with the titles that are popular across large demographic segments like Inu Yasha, Naruto, and lately Buso Renkin. Between the two of them they have, frankly, been eating ADV's lunch.

Interesting mental model.

UPDATE: Steven says builds an analogy with baseball, although in this case it would be more like selling the player like they do in NHL, not trading.

I forgot to mention, one of the interesting things about Robert's thinking was how The Right Stuf (TRSI) is absent. AoD people did make noises half-jokingly about TRSI rescuing the TTGL license, but nobody expected BEI to do it. And in Robert's graf TRSI are not even a part of the competitive landscape, just like Media Blasters.