At a glance that sounds like the "supplemental enhancement information" that H.263 had circa 2000, but the patent appears to have been filed in 2004 and issued in 2008. Am I wrong?
It is similar but not the same (I believe - I am not familiar with H.263).
The patent itself describes the difference between this idea and other Multi stream encodings. This idea can be applied to MPEG2 or any lossy codec and it also covers sending the enhancement data at different times and by different routes to the main data unlike other multistream/pyramid encoding approaches which expect simultaneous generation and transmission of the streams.
