By Eric Gwinn,Chicago Tribune

Todd Meyers is a “futurist” for Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve, a trend-spotting New York consulting firm. His job is to tell companies how to sell us what (we think) we want.

How will we get entertainment in the future?

It’s an on-demand consumer world. Now you can receive things on your iPod – podcasts – that you couldn’t a year ago. Apple will deliver full video in future versions of the iPod set to come out about a year from now.

It’s been said that five years hence, TV as we know it will be dead; we’ll watch mostly shows that we’ve recorded or choose from a library of shows through video on demand. The only live TV we’ll watch in significant numbers is cultural touchstones such as the Oscars and the Super Bowl.

The sooner the (TV) networks understand that, the better. They have to reach (viewers) with branded content brought to you by NBC, delivered to me on my phone, iPod, anywhere – on the mirror in my bathroom in the morning when I watch the news. The opportunity for content creators (such as TV networks) is to understand who I am and my unique set of needs that need different combinations of content.

For instance?

Let’s say I want something from the Chicago Tribune, but also movie reviews from The New York Times and something from iTunes. Because I let you do that, I pay a higher fee.

So, instead of sifting through the Web ourselves, we’ll tell our cable company, let’s say, what we like and it will deliver it to us via broadband, the way cable works now.

We have various platforms, technologies to deliver experiences to those platforms but nobody has put all those pieces together in an optimal way to meet needs of the consumer.

What’s going on in consumers’ heads now?

Two things: the evolution of clanning – the desire to belong to a group with common ideas – and something we call “curation nation” – networked peer groups have become editors. Peer groups are the new authorities.

And what are some companies that know what’s going on in consumers’ heads?

Apple. The iPod hit a different button in our culture: the creative economy. . . . Their advertising has been co-opted and co-owned by consumers. They’re continuing to anticipate where consumers will be.