To celebrate their 3rd birthday Philips Hue just announced 3 pretty big improvements coming to Hue!
Hue Entertainment
Philips has long been talking about “surround sound for the eyes”, Hue Entertainment takes that vision to the next level. It connects TV’s and consoles directly to the lights allowing them to change colour perfectly in time with the film or game you are playing – creating an ultra immersive experience.
Philips commented:
“We want Philips Hue to be a natural ingredient of any gaming, movie or audio experience, complementing action on the screen”
We know what you are thinking and no this does not require another hardware update, this is a software update, however you will need generation 2 hub. The technology does however require the content creators to integrate – from the demo image we can see Disney is already on board.
Brands can sign up to the program from October and it goes live customers in December – just in time for Christmas. See our Smart Home Gift Guide for Christmas 2017.
Hue Multi-packs
Soon you will be able to buy multi packs of Philips Hue bulbs, at a slightly better value than buying them separately. Although we are yet to see exact UK pricing. We can’t help but feel this is a response to competitors with lower pricing!
Commitment to ZigBee
As Philips Hue works on ZigBee’s lighting standard 3rd party bulbs can be added to its network. Recently IKEA made the jump and launched their own ZigBee bulbs. This made a lot of people question if this would be enough for Philips to move away from ZigBee to their own closed system. Fortunately for Hue users Phillips confirmed it is staying with ZigBee and will move to ZigBee 3.0 in 2018.