Philips Hue has spent almost 15 years building the smart lighting category… but now it wants to move beyond it.

That message was clear after Hue’s bumper IFA 2026 launch , where its parent-company Signify unveiled a wide range of new products and features across AI, TV entertainment, audio, third-party lighting and a growing range of design-led fixtures.

But it wasn’t just another big Hue product drop; there’s a more interesting strategy at play here. The market leader is clearly trying to make smart lighting appeal to people who don’t necessarily want a smart lighting system.

“It’s not necessarily only about buying into a system; it’s about buying into a use case,” Hue founder George Yianni told me at IFA.

That distinction is important because Hue has historically been very good at selling the system. You buy a Bridge, add some lights, connect them to the app and then, hopefully, keep expanding the setup.

But the smart lighting market has changed dramatically since Hue arrived in 2012. There are now cheaper, feature-rich lights from a growing number of brands, while companies such as Govee and Nanoleaf have built their own distinctive niches.

The challenge for Hue is no longer telling the smart light story. It’s convincing people why they actually need it.

“The challenge of smart lighting has evolved a bit beyond trying to explain what it is,” Yianni told me. “It’s not explaining that it exists. It’s explaining how the things that it can do are meaningful to a broader population of users.”

That helps explain the plethora of products and features Hue launched at the big Berlin expo last month.

Take the new Philips Hue Play Screen Sync. It is essentially an attempt to remove one of the biggest barriers to Hue’s immersive TV lighting by making the experience work with practically anything displayed on the television.

The camera-based system uses a fisheye lens and automatic calibration to watch the screen in real time and translate what it sees into dynamic lighting. That means it can react to native smart-TV apps, broadcast television and HDMI-connected devices without requiring the video signal to pass through a sync box.

There is also a cheaper Philips Hue Play HDMI sync box 4K, aimed at simpler HDMI setups, while a single Hue Play gradient strip can now connect directly to either system over Bluetooth without a Hue Bridge.

That last point is particularly interesting as Hue has traditionally been about building an ecosystem around the Bridge. But the new entertainment products can now provide an experience without one. Buy a screen sync device and a light strip and, as Yianni puts it, “you’re good to go.”

“I think that’s the focus shift we need,” he explained. “Of course, we still need to make the fans who want the system and to keep adding and expanding to it to be happy, and there’s innovations for them as well, but more and more of our focus goes towards having more single-minded, simpler first experiences, which I think is what the people who’ve not yet adopted smart lighting need in order to step in.”

It is a similar philosophy behind the new Liane 360° rope light. At a cent shy of $400, it’s unlikely to be an impulse purchase, but Yianni’s point is that a consumer doesn’t necessarily need to understand, or be interested in, Hue’s wider ecosystem to want one.

“It’s not about being cheap. It’s about being easy to understand,” he said. “It’s just a beautiful light object to decorate your home.”

“Our business model is based on satisfaction,” Yianni said. “It’s not like a mission that we need necessarily everyone to buy an additional 50 lights or whatever. Our mission is to have them happy.”

That also explains why Hue isn’t abandoning its premium positioning despite the proliferation of cheaper smart lighting products.

“We see ourselves as the market leader,” Yianni told me. “We should push the boundaries of what the category is.”

That can mean technology, design, new use cases or simply finding new things that people want lighting to do. The premium end of the range is where that innovation will typically start, he said, although Hue will continue to offer more affordable products too.

AI is another part of that evolution, of course. The headline feature from IFA was Custom AI Behaviors, which lets Bridge Pro owners describe an automation in natural language rather than manually piecing together triggers, conditions and actions.

You can ask Hue to make switches and sensors behave differently at weekends, trigger a scene whenever it gets dark rather than at a particular time, or change the lighting when an entertainment setup starts synchronizing.

It sounds like an obvious application of generative AI, but Yianni is keen to avoid AI simply being bolted onto the app because everyone else is doing it.

“I see AI as a tool,” he said. “And just like any other tool, in many cases it’s being applied even though it’s the wrong tool.”

His argument is that natural language makes sense where the number of possible outcomes becomes too large for a conventional interface to handle comfortably.

“If you are someone that has a lot of light and ambient scenes, AI is great,” he said. But for everyday tasks, a physical button can still be the better interface.

“We don’t expect for many people to replace physically interacting with a button for turning on the lights every day. That’s just easier.”

That thinking could become increasingly important as Hue moves toward a more autonomous smart home. Yianni sees a future where Hue can look at the products people have in their homes and how they use them, then recommend automations they might find useful.

“I think it will be recommendations, and then you choose how to apply it, so you’re in control rather than maybe just AI taking over,” he said.

Philips Hue isn’t trying to turn every part of the home into a Hue product. Instead, it is picking the areas where lighting naturally makes sense and building bridges into them.

The Sonos partnership is a good example. From November, selected Hue switches including the Tap Dial will be able to control Sonos speakers, including playing and pausing music, adjusting volume, skipping tracks and accessing Sonos Favorites.

Yianni sees a particularly strong connection between the two products.

“Sound and lighting... in some instances, are the two components that make the ambience, the atmosphere inside the home,” he said. “Surround lighting and surround sound. They are trying to achieve the same thing.”

Then there is Nanoleaf. Once big rivals, the two lighting specialists are now working together to bring compatible Nanoleaf Shapes into the Hue ecosystem via a Philips Hue Wall Light Module.

That means Hexagons, Triangles and Mini Triangles can become part of Hue scenes, automations and entertainment experiences.

It is an interesting move because, on paper, Matter should already make this sort of interoperability possible.

But Yianni argues that standards alone don’t necessarily always deliver a good consumer experience. Nanoleaf panels can already be controlled alongside Hue through the likes of Matter, Alexa or Google, but doing so can involve compromises and a fragmented experience.

“By doing this direct connection, by making this module, which turns a Nanoleaf panel into just a full consistent Hue product, you’re able to expose all the functionality which is far beyond what’s part of these standards,” he said.

Signify still wants to sell you a premium smart lighting system, of course. But it increasingly wants to sell you a better TV experience, a more atmospheric room, an easier automation or a way of bringing your music and lighting together.

The Hue ecosystem is still there in the background but it looks like Signify is trying to make sure you don’t need to care about the ecosystem before you find a reason to join it.