Subscriptions to rental services such as GameFly or codes for online game portals such as WildTangent also offergood value, allowing friends and family to play hundreds of titles for less than the price of one.
Technologies that let an IP-based telecommunications provider offer IP telephony services commensurate in quality to the traditional switched circuit providers, or at least as good a quality as cell phone providers can offer, are now getting close to being finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force.