Embodiments contemplate devices and techniques for receiving unicast and multicast transmissions over a downlink (DL) shared channel in parallel, for example an LTE DL shared channel (SCH). For example, one or more hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) entities may be configured to perform retransmissions of the multicast and/or unicast messages. Common and/or dedicated (e.g., separate) HARQ entities may be utilized for retransmission. The multicast downlink shared channels may be activated and/or deactivated on demand. The activation and/or deactivation may be performed using radio resource control (RRC) signaling and/or Medium Access Control (MAC) signaling. The multicast and/or unicast downlink shared channel data may include scalable video coding (SVC) data of varying priority. Embodiments also contemplate the use of simultaneous (e.g. parallel) multicast/unicast for scalable video coding transmission over WiFi/802.11 protocol signals.