Now, apparently, it is time to meet EQAL, a “social entertainment company” that is still essentially the two guys–Greg Goodfried and Miles Beckett (pictured here. left to right)–who dreamed up LG15 and also the KateModern Web series.

Except, rather than operating out of their homes on a wing and a prayer, they are now armed with $5 million in funding.

That investment in the Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based start-up, which was announced in April, included some true Silicon Valley luminaries, such as entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, investor Ron Conway and former Googler Georges Harik, as well as Conrad Riggs and Spark Capital.

Sources also said Google’s (GOOG) Marissa Mayer is one of the new investors in EQAL.

With its small pile of cash, Beckett and Goodfried are planning new online shows–one of which will debut in September–as well as a number of other things, in yet another attempt to create a successful mesh between Hollywood and technology and thus yield a lucrative and lasting interactive hit.

If anyone can give it a try, it would be this pair, which unleashed LG15 upon the unsuspecting Web population in mid-2006.

Unsuspecting, largely because most people at first thought the user-generated-looking online video of the incessant jabbering of its attractive female lead right into a computer’s camera was real.

Instead, it was actually the “story of a group of young adults fighting against an evil secret society, the Order, that uses the blood of girls with a rare blood trait to extend the lives of a small group of Elders.”

And they also used Neutrogena products while doing it! (The skin care company was an early sponsor, and a scientist from Neutrogena was also written into the story.)

So with clean faces and over the course of its two-year run, LG15 ran to more than 550 episodes with 100 million views.

Beckett and Goodfried also launched KateModern on the Bebo social network in the U.K. a year ago, which also just concluded.

The “story of a group of British young adults investigating a creepy, New Age religion called ‘The Hymn of One’ that is actually a front for the Order” garnered 50 million views.

Well, it’s all disorder now, as EQAL tries to keep the hits coming without LG15, by working with writers, producers, media companies and advertisers to create new interactive shows that also have engaged online communities.

EQAL’s motto: “The Show Is Everywhere.”

Well, we’ll see, but here are Beckett and Goodfried–the former was a physician and the latter a lawyer in their previous lives–giving me a tour of their new office in Los Angeles’s “Valley,” and also sitting for a longish video interview about where content online is going.

That’s a question a lot of people in both Hollywood and Silicon Valley hope they can answer.

Here’s the video:

And please, pretty please, it just can’t be “lonelygirl15″ (pictured below) and some clever music videos.

The lack of lasting and profitable professional content online is once again in sharp relief with the writers’ strike now taking place in Hollywood.

In a Wall Street Journal piece yesterday on the struggle between the Writers Guild of America and entertainment studios, Ken Hertz, a Los Angeles lawyer who has worked on digital music issues, made an interesting observation:

If anything, the strike could create an opportunity for the online world to step up and prove its value to the guild. A strike could in a strange way damage the studios by creating online competitors who come forward to offer the union writers a new model that no one would have otherwise had the time or effort to conceive of.”

If only.

Because, while the main point of contention between the two sides is how to split future revenues from digital distribution, I am not sure exactly when it will become more than the middling revenue (and not much income) online content generates today, which is more like splitting up a tip jar at Starbucks than raking in big bags of dough from some Hollywood blockbuster.

That is likely to remain true for a while, given that consumers still are not used to paying anything much for what is considered entertainment on the Internet today (which is largely user-generated content) and that there is still a major piracy problem when it comes to premium stuff.

What’s considered a hit? “Lonelygirl15″ on MySpace TV? Its creators, who also produce the “KateModern” online serial for Bebo, put out a press release this week noting “more than 70 million views for the original hit show, ‘lonelygirl15,’ and the spinoff ‘KateModern’ reaching over 15 million views in its first two months online.”

Not bad, and its attempts to integrate brands into the plot are well and good, if annoying, such as when “Johnson & Johnson’s Neutrogena became a brand integration with a character–Dr. Spencer Gilman, a scientist from the company–was featured across two months of programming.”

There are scads of such projects now in production in Hollywood, all trying to recreate the kind of programming that made television a lucrative industry way back when.

But, so far, these are still baby steps, as are all attempts so far in getting a true payoff from online video, despite new ad paradigms from YouTube and others.

Also interesting are new online video sites like Hulu.com from NBC Universal and News Corp., as well as Joost from the creators of Skype.

But their efforts still fall well short of a system in which consumers can truly manipulate and control their content anytime, any place and from any device.

And even real offline hits don’t cut it yet–NBCU’s Jeff Zucker complained in his recent goofy attack on Apple’s iTunes that the company only generated $15 million in revenue for its video fare on iTunes in its last year, including for its wildly popular series “Heroes” (which we certainly forked over cash money for!).

So what to do? I guess exactly what the writers are doing–banking on the hope that Hollywood will eventually get it right when it comes to digital distribution and asking for their fair share when it does.

Writers, quite reasonably, want to be paid more as their work moves online–to the Web, cellphones and anywhere else that gadgets send content in the future.

It’s an especially pointed desire, given that they were essentially shafted in the last digital transformation when DVDs and videocassettes appeared.

As John Aboud, who is a strike captain for WGA, noted in a comment to my post last week on the strike, that even with all the money Hollywood has made, most writers are not well paid (although those at the tippy-top are copiously compensated).

“Median earnings of all members of the Writers Guild is only $5,000,” he wrote. “How can that be? About 48% of members do not earn any money from writing in a given year. Of those writers who do make some money, one quarter earn less than $37,700 a year.”

Ouch!

Still, he is entirely correct when he also added: “The distribution of entertainment over the Internet is not the future, it’s NOW. If the producers succeed in gutting our right to compensation for digital reuse and delivery, that is income that’s gone forever.”

It’s certainly been a hit-or-miss proposition, since the Internet was popularized–mostly misses, actually. Beyond viral phenoms from the Dancing Baby to Mentos and Coke, there really is little there that has taken off in a big and lasting way online.

Many, big and small, have tried, but none have truly succeeded. Most recently, Yahoo pulled the plug on Hollywood player Lloyd Braun, for example, who was brought in to make Web hits.

But that has not stopped him–Braun’s got a new deal with Pepsi to create original online content. Over at AOL, which has a lot of history in this arena, there is much stuff in the works.

And sites like Funny Or Die–which uses more celebrities, like a recent one with Bill Murray–pop up daily.

One interesting effort is social network Bebo with its recent series called “KateModern,” an honest version of “LonelyGirl15″, both of which are series focused on attractive self-consciously self-conscious twentysomething women and their attractive friends.

And today, in a project with great similarity to these efforts, MySpace unveiled an exclusive partnership with well-known television producers Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, creators of such iconic shows as “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” for an original Web series called “quarterlife.”

The 36-episode series–there will also be a social-network component, natch–is about a group of attractive twentysomethings, with what appears to be, yep, another self-consciously self-conscious central female character who video blogs about them.

Sort of like hit BoomTown’s reality series–well, a hit with my Mom!–that is also posted below. We could use some self-consciousness, for sure, plus we’re much lumpier.

Here are some videos for you to peruse:

FCU With Bill Murray

KateModern

Lonelygirl15

Quarterlife

AllThingsD.com & D Unplugged

If not, don’t miss this story in The Wall Street Journal today about a 24-year-old guitar-strumming singer named Marié Digby, whose fans on YouTube thought her an authentic, bubble-up amateur.

Uh-oh, she has turned out to be more of a creation of a Hollywood recording company–specifically, Hollywood Records.

The Disney label, for example, pretended it had just signed her last week and called her a “Breakthrough YouTube Phenomenon,” even though that happened in 2005. Since then, Hollywood Records has been phenoming her secretly, conducting what amounts to a duplicitous, though successful, viral online marketing campaign.

In what is about the most astonishing–OK, appalling–quote, Digby tells the Journal’s Ethan Smith and Peter Lattman that she neglected to mention her big record deal, because “I didn’t feel like it was something that was going to make people like me.”

Actually, I don’t like her much at all after hearing that, although she sings an acoustic version of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” pretty well (see video below).

But, of course, such behavior is going to become normal as more Hollywood entertainment conglomerates latch onto the fast-moving, link-loving nature of the Web for marketing, especially when dealing with Web-savvy young people.

Well, not as savvy as all that, as it is sure easy to trick them or anyone else.

I guess it is pointless to get all righteous about this. But in this Voices text and video post, singer-songwriter Jill Sobule is asking the right questions about how to create and distribute music in the digital age (and she is actually authentic and honest and has had label deals).

And I am not entirely clear why a lot of this can’t happen on the up and up, given that both Digby and LonelyGirl15 are quite entertaining and having a Hollywood deal is not fatally uncool like wearing gaucho pants.

And speaking of viral phenoms, this is not a new thing for the Web. Recall back in the day, such digital winners as “I Kiss You” Mahir Ça?r? (pictured above) or, my all-time favorite, the Dancing Baby (also see below, but only if you want to be happy forever).

Oh, how I loved the time when it was all as innocent as Baby Cha-Cha and as brilliant.

Take note, Digby.

Yesterday, it was his talented eyebrows, and today, John Paczkowski’s very lustrous hair gets a workout in his Digital Daily video.

Using Selsun Blue, John washes away all pretense that Lonelygirl15 is anything more than a marketing shill with a recent deal with Neutrogena. Here is a direct link to today’s video, which is also below (don’t judge us for our promiscuous link-love here at AllThingsD.com).

Here is his text post about it in his Digital Daily column.

He also posts here about Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg’s latest boneheaded remark about the benefits to his company of the Apple iPhone rollout in a week, especially given that the carrier is not selling them. (Seidenberg also made another gooney remark about BlueTooth technology at the D conference a few years back that you can see here in a video).

And John chronicles the sweet revenge of entrepreneur Sky Dayton here, who was pilloried for buying the business.com domain for $7.5 million in the midst of the dot-com bubble–it is now for sale for $300 million to $400 million.