FabianIn April 2019, Signify, formerly Philips Lighting, acquired the French company WiZ. Since then, it has been operating as a low-budget brand with WiFi connectivity right next to the top dog Philips Hue. Now I ask myself: could the products of the two brands WiZ and Philips Hue soon be compatible with each other?
“Update
In the meantime, I have received feedback from WiZ and Signify. They say it’s actually just a number of display errors that are now being corrected bit by bit. At least a small benefit of my research.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any concrete details for you this time, but I would like to speculate a little. After all, I have found some interesting details on the WiZ website that are at least a little strange.
First of all, on all WiZ product pages, regardless of the country, “The Bridge” appears in the product details with the note “Max. number of accessories 9,999”. This is quite unusual, as WiZ works without a bridge thanks to the direct WiFi connection. It gets even stranger on the German website, among others, because it explicitly mentions a “Hue Bridge”.
Maybe just a mistake that nobody has noticed yet? I don’t know – and I did some more research. So I came across a “WiZ Test Bundle Product”, which among other things says “Hue Bridge included”.
And all good things come in threes. I also noticed a “Test Product I from Magento” on the WiZ website. There we see a product image Philips Hue Play Lightbar and some placeholders, such as the string “bridge.required” with the icon of a Philips Hue Bridge.
Is it all just a mistake?
That’s quite a lot of oddities all at once. It should not be forgotten that Philips Hue and WiZ use the same store system. However, I don’t know to what extent they are linked to each other so that data may be displayed incorrectly.
In principle, WiZ products could already communicate with the Philips Hue Bridge via the local network thanks to the Matter standard. On the other hand, Signify has kept the two brands strictly separate for good reasons. Will this change? I don’t know. Unfortunately, I can’t give you anything really solid yet.
wizconnected.com and philips-hue.com run on the same CMS. When Signify was making the WiZ website after acquiring that company, they used some content from Hue as placeholder.
Your conclusions from all this are going way too far.
This is exactly the point I made in the last paragraph of the article, they use the same store system. But why on earth do they write “Bridge” everywhere when no Bridge is needed or even existing? Even the commercial leaflets (which have been redesigned for 2025, by the way) mention a Hue Bridge:
https://www.assets.signify.com/is/content/Signify/DE.de_DE.8719514554153A
It’s all very strange and makes no sense to me. It’s all speculation so far, that’s for sure. Maybe it was just a very inattentive intern in the end…
A bridge (WiFi) would be a good idea as many cheap/free routers are crippled by the number of items connected to it. A Wiz bridge that just has lots of available connections (all with limited data) is probably a different device to a normal WiFi router that is purposely design to limit the connections and increase the bandwidth.
A good idea is not to use wifi for somethng like a light bulb that only uses data to switch of dim. Zigbee/Zwave/bluetooth or thread are better for it. Wifi is for data intensive devices not for lighting!
It’s a shame, the clear hue bulbs cost an arm and a leg, would have been nice to be able to use the cheaper Wiz filament bulbs, I’d switch but I don’t want to lose my TV sync