This sounds alarming, but you can think of it as an amicable divorce: Spark gets back all of its bubble-era investment and Eqal gets to keep going, with fresh money from new and existing investors.

Spark led a $5 million series A round in the company in April 2008. Eqal co-founder Miles Beckett wouldn’t tell me how much of the round Spark accounted for, but did say that the VCs were made whole in a transaction that closed at the beginning of this year.

So what happened? As far as I can tell, it’s a straightforward story: Eqal changed directions and Spark didn’t want to stay on board.

Eqal began life as a video-production house spawned by the surprise success of “lonelygirl,” the supercheap, superpopular Web series that crested on YouTube in 2006, just as that site was acquired by Google (GOOG). But by 2009, as the market for Web video ads was slow to develop, Eqal was shifting from developing its own Web video to helping other people make and distribute stuff.

If you want to paint that in a positive light, you can say that Eqal had become a Web video-platform company. A less attractive way to describe Eqal is as a Web video-services company. The difference is meaningful if you’re an investor because “platform” is a scalable business while a service company requires more money and effort and offers less lucrative returns.

Any way you slice it, Spark wanted out. “They wanted to zig and we wanted to zag,” Beckett says. He notes that current management and some original investors, including Ron Conway, helped finance the buyout; Eqal also rounded up new money from investors like Scott and Cyan Banister.

The deal is a much better outcome for Spark than Veoh, another Web video bet, was. That one collapsed in a bankruptcy-protection filing earlier this year. The firm still has money in two other Web video investments: Next New Networks and 5Min.

Meanwhile, I’m still looking for examples of companies that can say they’re doing a booming business by concentrating solely on making original Web video. Anyone?

Here’s a clip of “lonelygirl,” the series that put Eqal on the map. Below it is an example of the company’s new work, a promotional campaign for Kraft’s (KFT) Philadelphia Cream Cheese, starring food celebrity  Paula Deen.

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: