This paper highlights the benefits of user cooperation and network coding for energy saving in cellular networks. It is shown that these techniques allow for reliable and efficient multicast services from both a user and network perspective. The working principles and advantages in terms of energy and spectrum usage is explained for user cooperation, network coding and a combination of both. For multicast services it is shown that the proposed approaches can save as much as 90% of the energy on the user side and 66% on network provider side for the topologies under investigation. One interesting finding is that user cooperation can be beneficial for the network operator even if some users refuse to cooperate.