TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube are in talks with Google over a potential acquisition by Google of the video sharing site.

There are rumours flying around everywhere and apparenty the asking price is somewhere in the region of $1.6 billion.

I think there’s a fairly good chance that this might actually go through and that we’ll end up with a Google YouTube. But in that case, what will happen with Google Video? We could well end up with a hybrid YouTube/Google Video, or one could merge into the other.

Personally I’d prefer to see Google Video merged into YouTube if that were to happen and I think that is more likely. The YouTube brand is very strong and Google would be making a mistake to simply axe it and merge everything with Google Video.

Another issue here if the acquisition does go through is what Google will do with the sign in process. No doubt they will want to integrate YouTube with Google Accounts and the login system that provides, but that will take quite a long time and it will be interesting to see how they handle this.

Of course, nothing’s final yet and you’ll hear about it if this does go through.