Nah you can do something like:

1. Sort your bits by importance. 2. Encode them as a real number using arithmetic coding. 3. Transmit that real number in an analogue way.

That means the more noise you have in your signal the fewer bits you receive correctly.

There are probably much more clever ways to do it than that but I don't think much work has really been done on it unfortunately because it's quite complex.

The broadcast equivalent would be to transmit more error correction bits per capita with the important bits (i.e. those present in the lower constant bitrate stream). This is implemented in codec2 or the related modem system, I think.