The authors draw on four years of study on a proposed Canadian satellite system, to compare switching, uplink access and downlink distribution techniques for multimedia. Satellite systems offer special challenges to those who wish to offer multimedia service at an affordable cost. The space resource is a precious commodity and both bandwidth and power must be used efficiently. The traffic profiles and resource requirements of multimedia sessions are far different than those for telephony. These profiles are examined against conventional link access and switching techniques being used today, in satellite systems, for both single media voice and data. Finally, an optimum combination of uplink access, downlink resource allocation and switching is proposed for a multimedia satellite system. This is compared with more conventional telephony based systems and under a representative multimedia traffic profile, a parametric assessment of satellite resource efficiency is produced.