Highly scalable video compression based on invertible motion adaptive lifting transforms has emerged as a promising area in image processing research and an important component in interactive multimedia technology. However, within this feed-forward framework, the potential for coding efficiency improvement and its impact on random accessibility still has not been carefully assessed. In this paper, we compare the merits of several three-dimensional context coding strategies from an information-theoretic perspective. The variation in random access cost in response to coding parameter adjustments is analyzed, for a variety of spatial and temporal configurations.