Google is buying video-sharing website YouTube for $1.65bn (£883m) in shares after a weekend of speculation that a deal was in the offing. The two companies will continue to operate independently with founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley keeping their jobs along with 67 other staff - you can see their personal message on YouTube.

You can see CNN's report of the purchase - via YouTube here and the BBC report is here.

"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," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

He went on to say the two companies were "natural partners" to offer a media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers. Mr Schmidt also told investors that YouTube will be "one of many investments" Google plans to make in the video field. However, the company will keep operating its own Google Video as a separate operation.

YouTube, launched in February 2005, has grown quickly into one of the most popular websites on the internet with 100 million videos viewed every day (67,000 new ones added every day) and an estimated 72 million individual visitors each month.

A useful blog post on the acquisition by Paul Mason from the BBC can be found here.