This paper presents a new analytic framework for determining the reliability and average delay for a satellite communication system that uses a imodified hybrid ARQ protocol for retransmissicm procedure. Key to the analysis is a method for explicitly determining decoder error and failure probabilities for a channel characterized by multiple dependent symbol error and erasure probabilities. In addition, a new method for determining the delay and reliability for hybrid ARQ protocol using selective retransmiss:ion of codewords is derived for a system that uitilizes multiple codewords per packet. The two techniques provide the capabilities of investi,gating different wireless multimedia satellite networks with variety of retransmission protocol:j and access methods.