Asked by operators. Answered straight.

No — and be suspicious of anyone in this category who says yes too fast. LocationCast is in a 12-week pilot on our own group of Erie brands, with a published prove-or-pivot gate reviewed the week of January 18, 2027. After the gate — and after insurance, the services agreement, and billing are in place — three operators join a founding cohort. The only action available today is requesting access to that cohort.

One recorded 60-minute interview per location, once, at launch — a structured set of questions covering your rates, towns, offers, guarantees, and how your crews actually work. Then a shorter refresh each quarter as offers and seasons change. Approvals are a glance at a posted batch, only if you feel like it. That is the entire recurring commitment: about an hour per location per quarter.

The honest answer is: it will sound like what it is — an AI presenter, disclosed as AI on the content. What it won’t sound like is a text-to-speech demo. Presenters are cast under a written standard (face age and voice age agree, working-owner read, trade wardrobe and setting), scripts are written from your real answers in your trade’s vocabulary, and every piece passes an independent quality gate that bounces flat or uncanny reads. Judge it the way your customers will: the pilot brands’ programming is public, starting with the live channel on channel 06.

That difference is the design center. Each location has its own facts file, and copy may only draw claims from that location’s file — Location A’s price never appears in Location B’s episode, and an offer expires on its own date, not a group-wide one. What the group shares is the standard: presenter rules, brand system, quality gate. What it never shares is substance.

Each week’s batch posts to your client portal before it ships. Publishing-tier items sit for 72 hours; other content, five business days. If you comment on an item, only that item reopens for changes. If you say nothing, the batch ships when the clock runs out — deemed approval, carried in the services agreement in those words, and the agreement is signed before your first batch is ever produced. We verified by walking our portal that it offers no client approval buttons, so the clock — not a button — is the mechanism, and it is disclosed as such rather than dressed up.

Every location and every channel carries that location’s tracked phone number, and the monthly report is computed from call records: calls per location, counted per week, what shipped versus what was planned, and every exception. The report credits locations and weeks — not individual pieces; per-piece attribution does not exist today, and we will not pretend otherwise. Booked-job figures are shown only as labeled proxies unless your dispatch system confirms them directly. Impressions appear nowhere as a headline. Details on channel 04. One boundary, stated plainly: LocationCast is a broadcast and attribution layer, not an answering service — your lines are answered by your people or your existing service, at 2 p.m. and at 2 a.m. alike. Our job is to make the phone ring and to count it honestly.

You do. Accounts are created in your business’s name under credentials you hold; the system gets operating access, never ownership. Masters are delivered to your vault, every video ships with its editable timeline, and your facts files export in plain formats. Full inventory on channel 05.

The flywheel stops at the end of the paid period. What’s published stays published. You receive a final export — channel credential confirmation, masters, timelines, facts files, call ledger — and the hand is shaken. There is no exit fee for your own assets. The presenter’s terms are written into the agreement before launch, so nothing about leaving is a surprise discovered at cancellation. One of those terms is deliberately not settled on this page: whether the presenter itself is yours, licensed to you, or retired at exit is an open term the cohort agreement fixes in writing before launch. The rendered library is yours outright either way.

No. Your facts file and your call ledger are your business records; they are never shared with another operator, in any form. What generalizes across the group is structure only — which offer shapes tend to ring in which trade, which guarantee frames hold up — never your prices, your towns, or your numbers. That structural learning is part of how the system improves; the line it never crosses is drawn here, in advance, so you don’t have to take it on faith later.

It was, in a sense, designed by the franchise problem: brand standards enforced centrally, substance kept local, unit owners who cannot be given homework. A franchisor variant — system fee plus per-unit seat, sold to the franchisor and fulfilled per unit — is on the roadmap after the pilot proves the operator model. Franchise applications to the cohort are welcome; the variant’s architecture gets written with the first franchisor at the table, not before.

So is the pilot group’s — Erie runs snow, lawns, gutters, and painters under one operator. The question banks carry seasonal modules, the quarterly interview refreshes the seasonal offers, and the same presenter fronts the location year-round while the programming rotates with the trade’s calendar. Seasonal offers expire on their true dates and rotate out automatically; last winter’s price never airs in April.

Interview banks and facts modules exist today for ten niches: snow & landscaping, plumbing, HVAC, roofing, house cleaning, restaurants & food service, professional services, health & wellness, retail & e-commerce, and nonprofits. The system is built for home-services operators first — that is where the pilot runs and where the dossiers are deepest. A trade without a bank gets one built during launch; that is part of the launch work, priced as such.

Yes — the production pipeline has an existing-assets route: your footage, photos, and documents can anchor pieces instead of, or alongside, presenter production. Customer reviews can become content only when they are real reviews with documented consent, and they are presented as reviews — never invented, never paraphrased into a stronger claim than the customer made.

For home services, “near me” is decided in Google’s map pack before any video plays, so each location’s Google Business Profile is run as part of the station: built from the same facts file (DBA-correct name, categories, service towns, hours), fed by the flywheel on the weekly cadence — finished pieces become profile photos, offers become Google posts with their true expiry dates — and its status is a line in the monthly report. Verification is a step only you can complete inside Google; we build the packet and walk it to that door. In the pilot, packets are built for all nine of our own brands and none is verified live yet — we publish that status rather than a claim. Reviews stay yours and your customers’: the system never writes, buys, filters, or gates them.

Prevention first: an independent gatekeeper can bounce any piece before it ships, and claims are checked against the facts file arithmetically. If something wrong still airs, it is pulled and corrected through the same pipeline, and the incident lands in the monthly report’s exception section — which is never edited empty. Operationally, failed renders, stalled batches, stale facts, and zero-call locations each raise a loud exception to a human operator the week they happen, not at the monthly review.

Only offers that are in the location’s facts file, with their real terms and their own expiry dates — the same discipline the pilot group’s own rate cards run under. If a price is market-rate or you don’t publish one, the facts file says so and the copy treats it that way. A special you ran last season cannot leak into this season’s programming; expiry is enforced by the system, not by memory.

An agency sells you people’s hours, allocated across their client roster, and keeps the project files. LocationCast is a system that runs per-location production from your facts, hands you the timelines, and reports in calls. The fuller answer — including where an agency is genuinely the better tool — is the comparison on channel 05 and the arithmetic on channel 02.

They stay yours, and they stay running. LocationCast operates the broadcast layer — presenter programming, channels, the 24/7 TV rotation, and the Google profile feed. Your location websites become the conversion surface that programming points at: in the pilot group, the brand sites carry the quote forms, and a quote lead is counted per brand just like a tracked call. Nothing here requires pausing an ad program or an SEO effort, and the monthly report counts tracked calls and quote leads from records — it never blends them into your sites’ other traffic or your ads’ numbers to make one bigger figure.

The tools sell you a login and return the work to you — prompting, editing, posting, per location, forever. LocationCast is the operator those tools presuppose: the interviews, facts, scripting structures, production, quality gate, publishing, and measurement are run for you, and your locations’ channels are assets you own rather than projects inside a vendor’s app. If you have the hours and enjoy the tools, keep them; this exists for operators who don’t and can’t.

There is no public rate card during the pilot, on purpose: publishing prices ahead of the evidence is how this industry sells vapor. The structure is public — a one-time launch per location (credited against the first season for the cohort) and a per-location monthly seat that declines as the group grows, designed to land under the agency retainer for the same location count. Cohort terms are shared in the application conversation and locked for twelve months for admitted operators.

Erie is where our own locations are — the pilot had to run on brands we own, in a market with real winters and real competition, and that is Erie County, Pennsylvania. The system itself is place-agnostic: a location needs a facts file, a tracked number, and channels, and those exist anywhere. Cohort fit is decided on the application call, with one honest caveat — the closer your market’s seasons are to a northern trade calendar, the more directly the pilot’s evidence transfers.