It is baffling how something like this could happen, media companies sit on so many properties like this that they will never exploit. I know that in some cases not using the property is some sort of strategy but in cases like this they are leaving money on the table. Might be peanuts to them but it seems like an opportunity for some in-house streamlining to fully exercise dead properties.
That's the thing. It is peanuts. And it's peanuts that would probably be distracting from their primary focus.
Someone at $LARGE_COMPUTER_COMPANY once basically told me that, for them, if something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business, it wasn't interesting. Sure, something smaller might nominally have a positive ROI, but if you factor in the distraction/opportunity cost/etc., they just couldn't afford to deal with yet another $50 million revenue opportunity.
I wonder if Facebook was just a "$50 million revenue opportunity" and that's why Google didn't enter the space until it was too late. Maybe if Square and Westwood would have looked at a few more $50 million revenue opportunities they'd still exist.
Your basic point is fair enough but companies do need to focus and the larger they are the less they can afford to be distracted by small projects/products that have little hope of breaking out into something substantial. In this respect, they're something like VCs.
It's explicitly called out in a lot of business books -- as a small business you often have a lot of cover to undercut the incumbent, because they're just not interested in a niche that may be huge from your point of view.