(You can just imagine a big Hollywood muckety-muck telling his lowly recent college grad of an assistant to go to the party, because “we gotta be up on this digital stuff you young people like.”)

It was an interesting party for me for a lot of reasons, some of which had nothing to do with Joost, but mostly because it represents yet another foray into Hollywood for the Internet Story, The Sequel. (Also see the video after the jump.)

In the last go-round, there were all sorts of empty alliances struck between techies and the entertainment industry that went precisely nowhere–or as they say here, into perpetual turnaround.

But with broadband penetration improving significantly and the explosion of video on the Web, the best example being the spectacular growth of YouTube, a new dance has begun.

And because Hollywood is terrified of YouTube, and its owner, Google, alternatively scared, intrigued and indignant over copyright issues, the entrance of Joost, an online video platform for the distribution of professional content on the Web, could be just what the industry is looking for. Joost is counting on that compelling content to sell advertising on the site.

It’s funny, of course, that Hollywood is embracing a company founded by the same duo–Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström–who disrupted the phone industry with its Skype service and created the controversial peer-to-peer file-sharing service Kazaa, used by many to illegally download–yes–copyrighted entertainment content.

But now, of course, if you aren’t YouTube, you are a friend.

And Joost did not disappoint. Newly installed and perpetually smooth CEO Mike Volpi, a longtime Cisco executive pictured here, was there to assuage the worries and try to encourage content creators to think of Joost as a partner.

It was well received, too–some there were discussing the benefits of porting existing content from television onto Joost, while several people I talked to were working on all kinds of original new content, such as one person I know working with a group making cutting-edge Web videos about the business and machinations of Hollywood.

Here is another excellent piece about the event by Fortune’s most excellent Adam Lashinsky.

And here’s a video I did from the party, with a bit of touring of television history and a bit of the party and a bit of Volpi in action:

Please see this disclosure related to me and YouTube (owned by Google).

There will be coverage of all that here, of course. And, it’s a good thing, as I like going south of Silicon Valley, because it is almost impossible to write about the digital sector now without having much more than a passing knowledge of the entertainment industry.

The sector has been undergoing wrenching changes for a while now, but it is only going to get worse–or better, depending on your perspective–for the industry as it moves forward. So many of the most exciting recent start-ups, such as Joost, are aimed directly at the heart of what Hollywood has been doing for so long now–distributing great content to consumers.

For a long time, the entertainment industry has been terrified of this. I will never forget when the first Internet bubble burst in about 2001, when a major Hollywood executive and I were having lunch and he said to me: “I am so glad that is over.” By that, he meant the Napsterization of content and all the Web activity that had so hurt the music industry as it was.

That was, of course, way before YouTube was a gleam in the eyes of Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and well before broadband penetration had finally gotten to a point where things could get interesting. Now Hollywood knows it is no longer a black-and-white fight, but mostly shades of gray.

At our recent D5 conference, for example, we featured a lot of old-media players, all of whom acquitted themselves well when talking about digital issues, especially compared to past performances. While not wholly embracing the changes, all of them were able to finally learn to almost love the Web.

So I have been planning to spend a lot of time there and in this column, getting to know the players who are moving this circus and art–as George Lucas called it–forward.

Still, L.A. can be disconcerting to some (although I have always loved it), so you might like to check out the video for Loudon Wainwright III’s marvelous “Gray in L.A.,” which you can see a video of here. The song is featured in a recent movie called “Knocked Up,” a comedy also set in L.A.

My favorite lyric? The first: “When it’s gray in L.A., I sure like it that way cuz there’s way too much sunshine around here./I don’t know about you, I get so sick of blue skies wherever they always appear.”

I could not agree more.