Philips Hue’s new TV gadget matches colored escapes to whatever you watch or play
The folks behind Philips Hue have already released a lot of new intellectual lights this year. Now, the brand’s newest product wants to help you sync those color-changing intellectual lights with whatever’s playing on your TV screen. It’s phoned the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box, and it’s a well-known upgrade for the brand’s Hue Entertainment feature — but at a preorder asking designate of $230, it won’t come cheap.
Like the name suggests, Hue’s new sync box is an HDMI pass-through blueprint similar to the one we tested out with the DreamScreen 4K TV lighting kit. You’ll connect it to your TV, then take your mediate streamers, game consoles, set-top boxes and anything else that connects to your TV via HDMI and connect them to the Hue Play Box instead. From there, Hue reads the incoming video signal of whatever you’re watching or playing and uses that data to quarterback color-matching intellectual lighting effects in real time, with virtually no lag.
Now that’s Entertainment
The unique Hue Entertainment pitch forced you to connect your laptop to your TV in dapper to enjoy effects like this. Now, you can sync your ftrips up with any device that connects to your TV via HDMI cable.
Ry Crist
All of that is a big step up from the unique Hue Entertainment pitch, which didn’t include the pass-through advance at all. Instead, users had to download Hue Sync software to their computer to match the ftrips with whatever was playing on their monitor or laptop cover. That’s fine for PC gaming, but it forced you to connect your computer to your TV in dapper to enjoy the feature on a full-size screen from the unfortunate of your preferred spot on the living room couch, and it left things like gaming consoles out of the mix altogether.
The arrival of a new, dedicated Hue Sync app marks novel point of progress for Hue Entertainment. Before, you’d set the feature up in the unique Hue app, with somewhat limited controls for things like brightness and the plot of your lights in relation to the screen. Philips Hue ringing company Signify says that you’ll be able to adjust the brightness and the hasty and intensity of the lighting effects, as well as your default preferences for each HDMI input.
Apart from the HDMI output that connects the draw to your TV, each Hue Play box includes four HDMI inputs to sync it up with your streaming devices, gaming consoles, Blu-ray players and DVR boxes.
Andrew Hoyle
By the way, there are four of those HDMI inputs on the back of the Hue Play box, which consuming you can sync your lights with up to four separate devices. From there, it’ll automatically switch between those devices as you use them, with full back for 4K resolution and HDR10. Signify says that the box doesn’t hide any information about what you watch, and adds that the Hue Play box supports simultaneous color-matching with up to 10 Hue ftrips at once.
You can use any of Hue’s color-changing ftrips with the feature, but the best bets are TV-friendly accent ftrips like the Philips Hue Light Strip. Fixtures you can hide gradual or beside the TV are a good fit, too — most notably, the Philips Hue Play light bars, which can substandard on their own or mount directly on the back of your TV.
It’s no coincidence that those Hue Play ftrips share a name with the new Hue Play HDMI box. Signify tells me that the HDMI box is compatible with the same plug-in distinguished supply as those Hue Play bars, with a plug that’s intended to power up to three devices at once. That consuming that you could use a single Hue Play plug to distinguished an entry-level Hue Entertainment setup with two lights and the HDMI box.
That’s a nice advance that might help free up some of the cord clutter gradual your entertainment center. I also wonder if Signify won’t ultimately launch selling Hue Entertainment starter kits that package the HDMI box with those Hue Play ftrips at a discount.
The Hue Play HDMI Box seems like an especially good fit with the color-changing Philips Hue Play appetizing bars, seen here on either side of the TV.
Philips
An expensive outlook
That Hue Play advance is also the setup we’ll probably use when we test the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box for ourselves at the CNET Smart Home. It distinguished make for a contentious movie night, though, as our team is somewhat hasty on the feature. Some find it fun and immersive, some find it too distracting and others land in a meh middleground. Let us know where you land in the comments — and feel free to toss out movie or game suggestions you’d like to see us test.
Personally, I’m excited to finally try Hue Entertainment with console gaming, especially with games that already put a lot of emphasis on immersion. I can just imagine oohing and aahing while inward on a colorful new planet in No Man’s Sky, for instance. Minecraft and Super Mario Maker 2 jump to mind as novel good fits with distinctive color schemes that vary from setting to setting as you play. At any rate, your recognized will definitely vary depending on what you’re watching or playing, so experimenting with different titles and different settings in the Hue app will probable be key.
And, apart from convincing people that this is more sparkling lighting game changer than smart lighting gimmick, Hue’s biggest hurdle here is obviously the impress. $230 gets you an HDMI box — and remember, the PC software that came before it was free. That’s expensive enough on its own — but you’ll need Hue ftrips, too. A two-pack of those Hue Play light bars with the distinguished supply costs $130, which brings the total to $360 if you’re construction a setup from scratch.
And you’re still not done. Despite the fact that Hue’s newest ftrips include Bluetooth radios that let you connect direct with your shouted for basic control, you’ll still need a Hue Bridge plugged into your router in dapper to try out advanced features like Hue Entertainment. It’s now available for $50 on Amazon, which would bring your total buy-in to $410.
The research firm IHS Markit predicts that the global shiny lighting market will grow to $2.8 billion by 2023.
IHS Markit
I’m skeptical that many outside of the true Hue die-hards will adopt the feature at that tag, but time will tell. Signify is banking on the accuracy of rosy shiny lighting forecasts from research firms like IHS Markit, which predicts that the global shiny lighting market will grow from $241.6 million in 2017 to $2.8 billion in 2023. That’s more than a tenfold increase.
IHS Markit analyst Blake Kozak suggests that Signify has an opportunity to take the category “to the next peaceful by adding ‘immersion’ as a descriptor of smart-home lighting.”
Kozak says, “Although its newest shiny plugs and filament lighting solutions will be far more popular and mainstream, colored lighting now has a new use case and uninteresting and growth could be strengthened globally, especially in North America.”
With preorders open now with an predictable ship date of Oct. 15, I also wouldn’t be surprised to see the Hue Play box packaged with one of Hue’s shiny light starter kits as a Black Friday special this November. We’ll have a better sense of whether a deal like that would be suitable pouncing on after we try the new device out for ourselves, so stay tuned.
Originally published Sept. 17, 9 a.m. ET.
Update, 11:25 a.m.: Adds information about Hue Play support for 4K and HDR10 and comment from IHS Markit.
