When I picked up my new TV at Best Buy recently, first, I strolled through the TV section for kicks. A Philips Hue Strip ($256) caught my eye and I went for it. You use sticky pads to stick it to the back of your TV and it makes colored light.
The whole deal with Philips Hue is that you can control the lights via an app that is half-decent. You can do gradients of colors, mirror the colors, adjust the levels… it’s great.
But I caught wind somehow that the lights could sync with what is actually playing on the TV somehow (!!). I couldn’t figure out how that worked with what I had at first. Turns out you need more equipment. For one thing, I needed a bridge ($43), and, more importantly, a sync box ($222).
The bridge is just a home-base thing to control all the Philips Hue stuff in your house. Not needed just to control the strip, but as soon as you have multiple lights, you need it. The bridge is a prereq for the sync box for whatever reason.
The sync box is HDMI and needs to sit in line between the output device and the TV somewhere. For me, that’s:
AppleTV > Sync Box > Receiver > TV
So this thing literally reads the HDMI signal and figures out what colors are going through, and tells the lights to mimic those colors. That’s wild to me.
You can control how intense you want it to be. A lower setting changes the matching colors more slowly. The video above is set at the 3rd of 4 levels of intensity.
I’ve seen this poo-pooed online plenty as being one of the more useless Philips Hue products — but suck it haters — I think it’s cool as heck.
I have a Hue Sync box as well. One tip: Use ports 2 or 4 on the box if you’re having issues with HDR or other high-bandwidth content.
I love my Hue Sync. It was a pandemic splurge. I thought I might either tire of it or simply become accustomed to it, but just last night I was admiring the colors. It gives me so much joy.
If you haven’t watched Acapulco on Apple TV Plus yet, I highly recommend it both because it is a fun and heartwarming show, but also because the colors are vibrant.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CWhxpy_PYRc/
I will warn you that lighting like this can become addictive. At some point you notice that the colors are nice, but there is a space under the TV where they don’t sync. Soon you’re eyeing the Hue Play Gradient Light Tube. Or you end up wanting to light up more of your wall (Hue bulbs plus IKEA Fado lights work well for that).
And then you learn about Twinkly for Christmas lights… ;)