Chinese video-sharing web-site Tudou.com has secured $57m in its fourth round of financing from investors including previous backers IDG, Granite Global Ventures and General Catalyst.

The company also has financing from two new investors from the US and Singapore, according to Tudou press representative Lily Gong in a statement.

Tudou previously completed three rounds of financing from 2005 to 2007, receiving $500,000, $8.5m and $19m. With the fourth round it has raised finance of $85m. Gong said the investment will be used in expanding bandwidth and servers, in order to meet the demands of 10 million unique users per day.

Apart from short video-sharing, Tudou also provides streaming of movies with contents provided by partner sites such as Xunlei.com and TVB.com.

As one of the biggest video-sharing web-sites in China, Tudou faced a crisis over the past two months as the Chinese government announced that only state-owned sites are allowed to provide video services.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) later said that existing web-sites could continue services if they applied for a licence under 'Internet Audiovisual Program Services'. In March, Tudou was among the 32 websites that received a warning from SARFT for allowing 'inadequate' content to be uploaded to the site.

Tudou last week took part in a joint pledge among 80 web-sites, promising to be self-disciplined on filtering out illegal contents. It also joined six other video-sharing web-sites to sign a MoU with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) for online copyright protection.

Tudou.com is now waiting for an Internet Audiovisual Program Services licence from SARFT.

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