MelPhilips televisions with built-in Ambilight are a great thing. I've been using one myself for years but in the end a good offer for an LG TV came through. If you have an Ambilight TV in use you should definitely keep in mind the issues surrounding the interaction between Ambilight and Hue described in this article.
First of all, the connection between TV and smart lamps is useful: since the beginning of 2019, Ambilight+Hue has been working almost without delay thanks to the new Hue Entertainment technology. With a Philips TV, Ambilight can thus be extended to the entire room without any additional hardware – no matter what content you are currently enjoying.
That's why the Ambilight TV does not find new Hue lamps
In the last few weeks, however, several readers have contacted us: they seem to have problems adding more new lamps to the Ambilight+Hue function. What could be the reason for this?
I'll have to go a bit further: every lamp that is connected to the Hue Bridge gets a unique ID, starting with 1. If you delete a lamp, the ID is also deleted, but not reassigned afterwards. So if you add a lamp on a completely new bridge, it gets ID 1, if you delete the lamp and add it again, it gets ID 2.
In the Ambilight+Hue setup on the TV, only Hue lamps with IDs 1 to 50 are displayed. And this is exactly where the problem lies: in larger or older systems where newly added lamps are given IDs starting from 51, the new devices no longer appear in the TV's settings. There is no chance of pairing them with the Ambilight feature.
This is how the problem can be solved
Unfortunately, there is only one radical solution for affected users. Only by resetting the Hue Bridge to factory settings, the ID counter will start at 1 again. Needless to say that a whole new setup is a lot of work.
So the question arises: why doesn't Philips Hue simply fix the problem and extend the display to 100 IDs, for example? The simple explanation: you can't. Philips Hue is a brand of the company Signify, while Philips TVs are made by TPVision. The development in one company has nothing to do with the development in the other. Nevertheless, for the benefit of the customer one might expect the two companies to join forces and remove the current restriction.
Note: This article contains affiliate links. We receive a commission for purchases via these links, which we use to finance this blog. The purchase price remains unchanged for you.
Fabian
Thanks for the article. I had similar problem, TV actually showed lights greater than ID 50 but when I tried to save settings I didn’t get any errors but lights just didn’t worked, none of them. Then when I unchecked light with ID greater than 50 other lights started to work. My solution was that I needed to delete that light from Hue app and re-add it back, she get a lower ID than 50 and then all lights started to work.
I can confirm that this helped me as well.