One of the drawbacks of the Hue Play lighting systems is about to be fixed, provided you spend on a little box for your TV and video game system.
As cool as the Philips Hue Play lighting experience is, it comes with a bit of a catch: in order to extend your movies, TV shows, and video games across your living room, you need to use a computer.
Philips isn’t picky, and it can be a Windows PC or a Mac, but if you rely on a television in the centre of your home, it means extending the colours of your movies isn’t just as simple as Netflix and chill and Hue Play, but rather requires an extra step. You need to use your computer to send the information to your screen, or just outright plug your computer directly into the screen.
If you’re watching movies on your computer, that’s not so much a problem. In a shared space like a living room, it’s a different issue altogether.
We’ve said before that Philips should probably come up with an app integration of sorts, but it appears the makers of Hue have a different approach: an HDMI box that interprets the colours for you.
That’s coming in the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box, what acts basically as a box to take a feed from your entertainment devices and interpret the colour from them, such as your Blu-ray player, video game console, or something like an Apple TV. Sitting inside the Hue ecosystem, the box is an extra thing that can sit in your home entertainment setup, there specifically to interpret the colours sent by HDMI, before sending it back to a TV.
Aside for a long and complicated name, the Philips Hue Play HDMI Play Sync Box supported four HDMI ports to sync lighting and colour effects to a Hue lighting system, but it doesn’t have a release scheduled for Australia just yet. Right now, in fact, it’s basically Europe and the US that are being targeted for this year, with more countries to follow next year.
We expect that means Australia will see the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box next year, though it won’t likely be cheap, carrying a price of $229.99 in the US, and suggesting a price tag of between $300 and $399 locally when it does arrive.
