Are there transmission schemes that can transfer multiple independent streams that add up for better quality?

It could be streams containing information about smaller subblocs, etc.

If you take a fourrier transform, the more coefficients you include, the more faithful the reproduction is.

Splitting the quality level into multiple independent streams could have multiple advantages :

- better use of Multicast, as viewers for different quality settings get the same data, so you use approximately the bandwidth for one full quality video instead of full quality + medium + low...

- save on storage space for the same reason - save on transcoding time, as only one pass is needed

- better suited for distributed storage/transmission, on a platform like PeerTube, where every p2p client could contribute back instead of clustering by quality.

I am not working in this field, but I know a fair bit about compression, and this seems a no-brainer to me. Is it already done? Where? Or did I oversaw some issues?