The format follows the phone

Human reviews are almost always vertical video because they are made to be watched privately on a phone, and vertical fills the screen they will be watched on. That is not an aesthetic choice a judge made once and everyone copied. It is the format the viewing context requires, and everything else follows from it.

Who actually watches these, and how

A review clip is watched by one person, privately, on a phone, usually with headphones in and usually not in a place they would want to be seen watching it. That device is close to universal: Pew Research Center's 2025 survey found 91% of US adults own a smartphone, up from 35% in its first survey in 2011. That single fact decides the format. Vertical fills a phone screen without the black bars a horizontal clip leaves top and bottom; a horizontal video shrunk to fit a portrait screen looks like an afterthought, and a review clip is the opposite of an afterthought - it was made for exactly this viewer, on exactly this device.

Why not horizontal

Horizontal video is the format of things made to be watched by an audience on a bigger screen, or edited with more than one shot. Nothing about a commissioned review has that shape. There is one subject, one camera, one continuous take addressed to one person, and horizontal framing does not suit a single face talking directly into a lens the way vertical does - vertical puts the judge's face at the size and closeness a phone conversation would, which is exactly the sense of presence the format is selling.

Why short, not just vertical

The same logic explains the length as much as the orientation. A clip runs a minute or two because that is how long a register holds, and a private phone viewing is not the context for a longer sit, the way a horizontal video edited for an audience might be. Short and vertical are the same decision made twice: made for one viewer, on one device, right now. It is also why a written review, with no viewing context to fit at all, does not inherit any of these constraints - length and shape there are decided by the writing, not the phone.

What this is not about

This is a format observation, not a filming guide - how a judge actually sets up a shot, lights it or frames it is their craft, not a buyer's concern, and a buyer sending their own material follows a separate, simpler set of guidance about photos rather than anything about video production. The format also has nothing to do with measurement; if a number is what you are actually after, that is a tape's job, not a camera's, and an automated tool that returns a score rather than a clip skips the whole video question by not making one. Commissioning through a platform does not change any of this - the vertical, short, private form is simply what the medium is for, on any service that offers it.