A View From My Seat: Scout the view from every seat in the house

Thanks to a South Philadelphia man, there’s no need to worry about purchasing a pricey stadium ticket and getting stuck behind a foul pole or glass partition.

At least that’s the vision behind A View From My Seat, a website and Android app that encourages users to upload cell phone shots of, well, the view from their seats in thousands of venues around the world.

“The idea came out of me and my wife wanting to find a better place to sit before we bought Phillies season tickets,” said creator Frank Panko, 36. “We looked around at a game and everyone had a smartphone, iPhone or Android and they were all taking photos.”

The app, which was released in beta mode last July, currently shows views from over 7,000 seats across the country and about 600 in Philadelphia, where its following is the strongest.

Baseball is the most popular sport, but people can send pictures from any event. “Some of the stuff we get surprises us: golf, some Nascar and monster truck rallies,” said Panko, who quit his job two weeks ago to focus on developing the program full-time. “Outside of the U.S., we do well with soccer, especially the Premier League in the U.K. Whatever people send, as long as it’s venue-related, we just try to adapt to it.” 

Though a View From My Seat currently has photos from 1,200 venues, Panko estimates that it covers less than 1 percent of available seats in the country, a figure he hopes to change. “I’d like to see if I can partner with a bigger company like StubHub or Ticketmaster to have photos show up when you’re actually buying tickets or to get people discounts for every photo they share,” Panko said.