Philips Hue

Philips Hue, launched in 2012, was one of the first mainstream consumer smart-lighting products and is widely credited with popularising the smart-bulb category. The brand is owned by Signify, the lighting company that was spun off from Royal Philips in 2016 and formally renamed Signify in 2018, though it retains the Philips brand under license for consumer lighting products including Hue. Hue bulbs, light strips and fixtures connect via Zigbee to a central bridge, which in turn links to Wi-Fi and cloud services, enabling scheduling, colour control, and integration with voice assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple HomeKit. Signify has continued to invest in Hue as smart lighting has matured from a novelty into a mainstream home-automation category, adding features such as entertainment sync (lighting that reacts to on-screen content), outdoor lighting lines and, more recently, Matter compatibility to reduce ecosystem lock-in. As one of the earliest and most recognisable smart-home brands, Hue is frequently used as a reference point for smart-lighting adoption trends, energy-saving claims, and the broader shift of legacy lighting manufacturers into connected, software-updatable products — a transition also under way among Indian lighting manufacturers entering the smart-home space.