Systems and methods use multiple spatial layers for physical multicast channel transmission. Certain embodiments introduce additional multimedia broadcast multicast service reference signals that support more than one antenna ports for multicast broadcast single frequency network transmissions. To reduce channel estimation complexity due to the multicast broadcast single frequency network reference signal design, resource elements of the multicast broadcast single frequency network reference signals may have a nested structure. To assist modulation and coding scheme selection, a user according to certain embodiments also independently reports block error rate measurements for each spatial layer of the multicast channel.