BitTorrent came and turned the file distribution process upside down. Even the big and conservative movie studios acknowledged the potential of the new file sharing technology. The problem with BitTorrent and other similar protocols that allows multiple sources is that they all require identical sources. This has now been solved by assisting Professor David G. Andersen at Carnegie Mellon University and he calls the new technology Similarity-Enhanced Transfer, or SET. The technology simply search through the files to find parts of the files that match, even though the complete files may not be identical, and in that way lets a user download data from several different sources.
The result is a completely correct and fully functional file with the information you were looking for and you got it faster than you would have without the technology. Considering how many that are using async Internet connections and the possibility to download material much faster than they can upload, the downloading can still be a rather painful process because of the slow uploads.
By using this technology you get more sources and thus more bandwidth. An excellent example is music files. They are identical to almost 99%, but by just updating the meta data, or ID3-tag, the music file can’t be used as a source by either Torrent or any other protocol.
Another example mentioned by Andersen is dubbed movies, where you will be able to download the video content from users with movies in any language and the audio from the “correct” sources. There is no need to search and search to find the right audio as you can focus the audio downloading from the right sources and the video from the others.
The actual downloading process is very similar to that of BitTorrent as the information is split into smaller segments. For example; a 1GB file would be split into 64,000 pieces at 16KB each. The first tests when downloading music showed up to 70% faster download, but then again music is a real dream scenario for SET.
The researchers have no plans for integrating the technology into existing movie or other media distribution systems, but they encourage others to do so. We dare to guess that it is just a matter of time, before it will happen.
