FabianOn Wednesday, Philips Hue announced a brand-new feature that will be used for the first time during the upcoming World Cup. During each match, you’ll be able to make your Hue lights in the living room (or any other room in your home) light up in sync with the game. Today, I’d like to share a few more details about the new Hue Sports Live with you.
How much does Hue Sports Live cost, and what hardware is required?
Hue Sports Live is integrated into the Philips Hue app as a free feature. Aside from the Hue Bridge or the Hue Bridge Pro, no additional hardware is required. Synchronization works even without the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box. Of course, it’s recommended to have at least one colored Hue light in the desired room—preferably even more.
Can the Hue Sync Box and Hue Sports Live be used at the same time?
If you use the Hue Sync Box or the Hue Sync TV app to synchronize the lights around your TV with the screen content, you can also use the new Sports Live feature during soccer games.
In the Hue app, you can specify which lights should react to the Sports Live effects. Once synchronization is started, the lights in the designated entertainment area enter screen synchronization mode and do not react to Sports Live events. All lights not located in the entertainment area continue to react to the Sports Live effects.
Which game events are represented as light effects?
You can see exactly what happens to your lights during the game in the following list:
- Start of the game: Green flashing for 5 seconds.
- Goal: 5-second animation in the colors of the scoring team.
- Penalty shootout: Blue flashing for 5 seconds.
- Yellow card: Yellow flashing for 5 seconds.
- Red card: Red flashing for 5 seconds.
- Yellow-red card: Red-yellow flashing for 5 seconds.
- Half-time ends/game resumes: Green flashing for 5 seconds.
- When a team wins: A 15-second animation in the winning team’s colors.
To ensure the lights react as quickly and appropriately as possible, the current game duration can be manually synced with the TV in the Hue app after the game kicks off.
All in all, definitely an interesting development. As I’ve since seen, the sister brand WiZ even offers not only soccer but also light animations tailored to Formula 1 races. Let’s see if Philips Hue will deliver something similar in this regard as well.
