Google acquired video-sharing giant YouTube today in an all-stock deal worth $1.65 billion, a move that links the upstart's massive catalog of videos with Google's vaunted online advertising heft.

"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 in a statement.

The companies said today that YouTube will retain its autonomy, keeping its brand and offices for the time being.

"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," YouTube CEO and cofounder Chad Hurley said in a statement.

Google and YouTube might have cleared the way for the deal with a series of licensing agreements with major record labels earlier today.

YouTube said today that it signed a licensing deal with Universal Music Group, giving its site legal access to thousands of the label's music videos and ending a standoff over copyright infringement that had Universal chief Doug Morris threatening legal action last month.

YouTube also said it signed a similar deal with Sony BMG. Those deals mirror the agreement the fledgling company signed with Warner Music Group last month, allowing the labels to monitor YouTube's catalog to eradicate illegally uploaded videos from its site. All three deals also give YouTube users access to those labels' songs for use in homemade videos uploaded to the site.

Likewise, Google said today that it also inked distribution deals with Sony BMG and Warner Music, giving its own Google Video service legal access to the music video catalogs of those labels.

"We are proud to partner with an online innovator like Google to further our efforts in this space, and we are gratified to see that other major music and technology companies are beginning to embrace these new models as well," Warner Music Group executive vice president Alex Zubillaga said in a statement.

But it was YouTube's announcement that most industry insiders were interested in, as Morris' comments last month had some speculating that the video site could be hit with a major copyright infringement lawsuit that Google would thus inherit if it acquired the 19-month-old company.

Each of the deals stipulated that advertisers would sponsor the music videos and that YouTube and Google would share that advertising revenue with the labels.

YouTube announced a separate deal today with CBS. The network will distribute short-form video programming from its news, sports, and entertainment divisions on YouTube's Web site on a daily basis beginning this month. The two parties will share revenue from the resulting advertising sponsorships of CBS videos.

"We're pleased to be the first network to strike a major content deal with what is clearly one of the fastest growing new media platforms out there," CBS said in a statement. "This strategic partnership is a unique development in CBS's continuing initiative to monetize our industry-leading content across new distribution platforms. We're now able to offer select entertainment, news and sports programming to a new significant audience, get paid for it, and learn a few things along the way."