After it was announced this morning that Sony BMG and Universal Music Group both signed deals with YouTube to allow the video sharing site to offer music videos by their artists, and Sony BMG and Warner Music Group also signed similar video deals with Google, Google and YouTube have now become one in the same. Google announced on Monday afternoon that it has agreed to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction, and that YouTube will continue to operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community of users. YouTube will continue to be based in San Bruno, CA and all YouTube employees will remain with the company, according to a press release.

"The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “Our companies share similar values; we both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers.” 

YouTube CEO and Co-Founder Chad Hurley added, “Our community has played a vital role in changing the way that people consume media, creating a new clip culture. By joining forces with Google, we can benefit from its global reach and technology leadership to deliver a more comprehensive entertainment experience for our users and to create new opportunities for our partners. I’m confident that with this partnership we’ll have the flexibility and resources needed to pursue our goal of building the next-generation platform for serving media worldwide.” 

Earlier this morning, Sony BMG and Universal said they will allow YouTube users to incorporate music from their libraries into the videos they create and upload onto YouTube. Also as part of the deals, Sony BMG and Universal will share revenue with YouTube from advertising on all of their videos as well as the user-created content that incorporates music from their libraries. YouTube and Universal also agreed to a process that will filter out UMG content that is not authorized to appear on the YouTube service. Meanwhile, Sony BMG and Warner Music said that starting this month, their video catalogs will be available for online streaming at no cost to Google Video users.