If you are far away from each other and no one can help, this might be the better way: Switching to a MacBook. If you are relatively close to your relatives, you might want to set it up for them.

Of course, everyone has to change the app. As a videoconferencing app, Zoom is a good choice, the landscapemode works great with it. The workaround (we really don’t have a better solution, even with HDMI on the iPhone or iPad there is no landscape image), is as follows: You either have to use another app or other hardware. Maybe it’s not a bug and Apple simply forbids you to use FaceTime this way, because two compatible Apple devices don’t mean that the third component, the Apple FaceTime app, does what you expect. If you switch to FaceTime, it is only in portrait mode. This can be easily verified when you look at your photos while the screen mirroring is active: they are displayed in landscape mode without any problems.

And that works fine – except for one huge catch: Apple forbids to use the landscape format when using FaceTime. Your idea will be the same in both cases: Simply stream the FaceTime picture to the TV via AirPlay. Maybe you have a modern TV that already has AirPlay 2 integrated or you have a separate Apple TV connected via HDMI. If you often hold video conferences with your family, where several people are sitting in front of the TV, you might want to display the FaceTime session on the TV so that all participants can be seen on a big screen.

How to airplay from mac facetime