Review: Govee Flow Pro

Smart lighting is an easy way to create some ambiance in a room and change the feel of the space. It comes in many forms nowadays, from smart bulbs and light strips to all kinds of oddly shaped lamps. The Govee Flow Pro is one such RGB accessory that's designed to flank a TV or monitor screen to bring a splash of diffuse light and color to your setup.

It’s easy to pick colors or animations, but the real attraction of these vertical light bars is their ability to match on-screen action and react to music—all for just $80. That's significantly more affordable than other devices that offer reactive smart lighting. There's a bit of setup and finagling required to get the Govee system going, but it works. The catch? It relies on a camera. 

Photograph: Govee

The Govee Flow Pro system comes with a pair of 10.5-inch rectangular  plastic light bars and a choice of two mounting solutions: stick them to the back of a TV or monitor, or slot them into stands. The light bars connect to a separate control unit via a lengthy USB-C cable, and the camera—yes, camera—plugs into the unit's USB-A port. You'll need to then hook the power adapter to the control unit to light the whole thing up.

The control unit has a power button, a color cycle button, and a button to switch to audio-reactive lighting, which brings us to the reason why there's a camera here at all. You point the webcam-like device at your monitor or TV so it can see what's going on and adjust the colors of the light bars to match. Watching a fiery scene from a movie? The camera tries to pick up the colors and directs the light bars to mimic them for a more immersive feel. 

To do all of this, you first need the Govee Home app on your phone and run through a calibration process that involves sticking orange foam squares onto your TV screen or monitor. It took around 30 minutes to complete this setup process. Both the control unit and the camera have an adhesive backing, so you'll want to pick a permanent spot for them carefully. The camera is angled to watch your TV or monitor and needs to be in the center top or bottom of the screen. This won't work for every household as some bezel-less TV designs make placement at the top awkward, and placing it at the bottom can block the TV's infrared sensor for the remote control. 

The light bars are also designed for screens between 27 and 45 inches, and the reactive lighting won’t work properly with other screen sizes. If you have a 55- or 65-inch TV, you can get similar functionality from Govee’s Immersion TV Lightstrip.

Govee's app has a ton of colors, scenes, and other preset lighting effects to choose from. It feels a little chaotic and takes some getting used to, but it’s worth experimenting here. You can create lighting effects if you’re prepared to spend the time learning how it works, and you can also schedule your light bars to turn on and off automatically.

The Flow Pro light bars are compatible with Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant, provided you connect them to a 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi network. Once linked to your respective voice assistant, you can turn them on and off or change colors and scenes with voice commands. It’s handy when you’re kicking back watching a movie and works well.

The main reason why you might want some light around your monitor or TV screen is to help your eyes. This is called bias lighting, which sits behind a screen or monitor to provide indirect light that can reduce eye strain and fatigue when you’re watching in the dark. It can also increase your perception of the contrast, making dark areas on the screen appear darker. Adaptive or reactive bias lighting adds a layer of immersion by matching the colors to the on-screen action.

Photograph: Govee

There’s nothing new about this, but it used to be very expensive to set up. Nowadays you can achieve a similar effect for significantly less money. The Govee light bars put out a warm diffuse light, and each has six sections supposedly capable of cycling through millions of colors. Brightness is limited to 400 lumens, which is a bit less than the 530 lumens the Philips' Hue Play bars can manage, but it’s bright enough for the task. These light bars are designed for use in a dark room and are not meant to be a primary light source. 

I spent a week watching TV shows, movies, and playing games at night using the light bars with a 42-inch TV, and you can color me impressed. The changing colors often enhanced the action, and I enjoyed the effect when gaming. 

That said, the color matching isn’t always accurate, and it's shame the bars only display one color each in video mode when they can usually handle gradients. It can also be distracting if things get frenetic on-screen. Not every transition is smooth, and it doesn’t suit every show or film. It works well with animated content, for example, but feels weird with reality TV or a cooking show.

Thankfully, it’s easy to switch to a plain color. The Flow Pro light bars can be used independently of the TV, and they help set a mood. The music mode also nails that disco feel and is fun for parties (when we can all have parties again).

Any internet-connected device with a camera and microphone presents a privacy concern, and there’s no easy way to turn either of them off here without turning the lights off. The camera points at your screen, and Govee insists the footage and audio are only used to sync the lighting, a process that takes place locally in the control unit. 

The company says no user data is collected. The only time an upload takes place is during calibration, and after that the internet connection is only required for smart home control. I tested this by blocking the Flow Pro from my Wi-Fi via my router app and found that the reactive lighting still worked, though the voice commands no longer did. This is one workaround for anyone concerned about potential breaches, but it's silly that there's no physical way to shut off the camera and mic.

It'd be easier to recommend the Govee Flow Pro light bars if they didn’t rely on the camera. Beyond privacy, the camera looks ugly. And if you hate visible wires, the design of the control unit, with wires plugging into both sides, will also irk you. 

Govee does offer various models of these lights. Its Smart Light Bars ($60) don’t have the adaptive bias lighting or smart home support, but they also don’t require the camera or Wi-Fi access, and you can still control them with the mobile app using Bluetooth. The Flow Plus light bars ($65) add Wi-Fi for Alexa and Google Assistant support but don’t have the camera.

If reactive lighting is a feature you really want, the Flow Pro system isn't as accurate as Philips' leading Hue system, but it's much closer than the large gap in pricing suggests.