Only You Can Prevent Vertical Video Syndrome

Just to play devil's advocate, the landscape orientation may have become the default for video - but it was not the original. The first television system (the Baird mechanical system) was a 30 line vertical scan screen in a portrait orientation. I contest that a portrait orientation should be used when warranted - as landscape is quite often a waste of visual information for a single subject (otherwise, I would say that all pictures and photographs should be landscape to fall in line with the lazy "That's the way it's been done" aesthetic…)