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I didn't realize there was a fight. As far as I remember, YouTube allows uploading any aspect ratio you can dream of and they automatically add the black bars for you. Maybe you're comparing to Vimeo? YouTube's video player is annoying, but I don't see them as biased against portrait videos.

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What I mean is that it shouldn't have those black bars if I view on mobile in portrait orientation. It should fill the whole screen, just like it does for landscape videos if the phone is rotated to landscape.

Also, the web interface could rearrange itself to better fit the description, comments, and related videos to the right of the video if the video is portrait instead of black bars. I don't want to have to go full screen just to be able to see what is happening.

Finally, taking a 1080x1920 video and fitting it to 1920x1080 means that there's a loss of data.

IIRC The android version of YouTube supports this

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/07/22/you-can-now-watch-vert...

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