There was a time when the phrase "removing friction" referred primarily to industrial lubricants, but in the media and entertainment business it has come to mean something closer to: "We have software that will do the parts of your job you find tedious."

A roster of new technology products, highlighted recently by Fast Company as part of its annual awards program, suggests that friction removal is very much the order of the day — whether the friction involves animating a character's walk cycle, producing a shot list from a script, or persuading an influencer in São Paulo to deliver the same message as one in Stockholm.

Autodesk, the company whose Maya software has been a standard in animation studios for decades, has introduced a feature called MotionMaker that uses artificial intelligence to predict character movement. The goal, according to the company, is to let animators spend less time on what it delicately calls "repetitive production tasks" — which is to say, the parts that feel like work.

(Whether animators will thank Autodesk for handling the tedium or worry about what comes next is a question the company's marketing materials do not address.)

Elsewhere on the list: L-Acoustics, the French audio company, has deployed a new sound system at the Hollywood Bowl that promises studio-quality sound with smaller speakers and fewer obstructed views; Lemonlight has introduced an AI tool for video production that can generate storyboards and call sheets from scripts; and Linguana offers a platform that allows brands to run influencer campaigns across languages and markets — solving, the company says, the "fundamental issue" that such partnerships do not scale.

For sports broadcasters, a company called Peripheral is offering neural rendering technology that delivers what it calls "any-angle replays" at a fraction of previous costs, a feature it believes will appeal to younger fans accustomed to video game perspectives. The technology is already being tested by teams affiliated with the N.B.A.

And Utopai Studios, a company that is, at its core, a film studio — its words — has released a video generator capable of producing up to three continuous minutes of 4K footage with consistent characters and narrative flow. The company reports $11 million in annual recurring revenue within six weeks of release, which suggests someone is finding the friction sufficiently reduced.

Original story published in Fast Company: "The 5 next big things in media and entertainment for 2026"