  A computable expression for the rate-distortion (RD) function proposed by
Heegard and Berger has eluded information theory for nearly three decades.
Heegard and Berger's single-letter achievability bound is well known to be
optimal for \emph{physically degraded} side information; however, it is not
known whether the bound is optimal for arbitrarily correlated side information
(general discrete memoryless sources). In this paper, we consider a new setup
in which the side information at one receiver is \emph{conditionally less
noisy} than the side information at the other. The new setup includes degraded
side information as a special case, and it is motivated by the literature on
degraded and less noisy broadcast channels. Our key contribution is a converse
proving the optimality of Heegard and Berger's achievability bound in a new
setting. The converse rests upon a certain \emph{single-letterization} lemma,
which we prove using an information theoretic telescoping identity {recently
presented by Kramer}. We also generalise the above ideas to two different
successive-refinement problems.
