The present invention generally relates to the transmission of digital data, and more particularly, to the transmission of digital data in a satellite digital audio radio ("SDAR") system. In the SDAR system, there may be different types of required services. Some of these services may be considered high priority and others may be of a lower priority. Current SDAR systems have the same performance on all user data. Therefore, there is a need to vary the performance of different services.The present invention provides a method and apparatus for optimizing the throughput (i.e. information) in a digital transmission system by transmitting the different services with different performance levels. The present invention addresses the need in the art to vary the performance of different services (i.e., levels of data). Because the performance of the primary level of data will not be equal to the performance of the secondary level of data, the primary level will need to be further protected. The primary level data may be streaming data. The secondary level data does not need as much protection because it may be rebroadcast repeatedly. The easiest and most cost effective solution is to integrate multiple symbols for a secondary level bit. The present invention provides a method and apparatus in which the power level for the data levels can be set within each data packet using a message header providing the different services with different levels of performance.