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.
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