Govee TV Backlight 3 Lite Review: Elevating the TV Watching Experience

If you watch TV at night, installing bias lighting behind your TV can help reduce eye strain and  make contrast easier on your eyes. Govee recently sent us their TV Backlight 3 Lite to check out, so let’s take a quick review at what it can do.

The TV Backlight 3 Lite is controlled by the company’s Govee Home iOS app. In the box you get a roll of RGBIC+W (Red, Green, Blue, Individually Controlled + White) strip light, a control box, camera that mounts of top of your TV and power adapter.

Benefits of RGBIC versus standard RGB LEDs? RGBIC allows each bead to display multiple colours simultaneously, allowing for gradient and multicolour effects. With white tossed in, you get a cleaner, more accurate white light as well (white is not washed out or affected by other colours).

The camera mount will then look at what’s showing on your TV and relay these colours, synchronized to the LED light strip behind. It’s a very cool effect that makes watching TV at night far more enjoyable.

Setting up the TV Backlight 3 Lite was fairly easy. The thick LED strip light sticks well to the back our TV (there’s plenty of room to go around corners), while included adhesive strips ensure the strip stays put. So far, nothing has fallen off yet unlike cheaper bias lighting trips we’ve tried.

To set up the fish camera, it did take a somewhat balancing act at first to have it stay put atop our LG OLED TV (the panel is super thin), but an adhesive strip kept it in place on the back.

You need to stick these square orange foam pads on top of your TV’s surface to calibrate the camera in the Govee Home app. This lets you set the edge of your TV and what the camera can see.

After getting it set up, the default settings show a very bright LED backlight that syncs to what’s being shown on your TV. It’s pretty cool seeing different colours show around the perimetre of your TV, based on what’s being shown.

In mixed dark and bright scenes, some areas would have lighting and some would not. I found this distracting, but the Govee Home app lets you change it so only a solid colour shows around the TV at all times. After some tweaking, having the strip light brightness at about 50% on all four sides (you can customize each strip’s brightness) was the best setting for me.

Take a look at the picture below and you can see all the various colours:

Here’s a good example of the TV Backlight 3 showing colours behind your TV, reflecting what you’re watching:

When the camera detects a blank or static screen, the LED lights will turn off. You can change this duration of when it will turn off in the Govee Home app.

The Govee TV Backlight 3 Lite works with Google Home, Amazon Alexa and supports Matter as well. This means you can control it with Google Assistant or Alexa. We didn’t set this up as the lights just turn on when the TV turns on.

You can sync this with up to 7 other Govee devices to create the ultimate lighting effects. You can now watch TV and get some bias lighting for your eyes, which also gives some ample light for the room so you can also see when you’re watching TV with no lights on.

Overall, Govee’s TV Backlight 3 Lite is easy to set up and makes it a joy to watch TV at night in the dark. Pricing starts at $99.99 (there’s coupons available now) depending on your TV size (and length of LED strip needed) and it’s worth considering if you want to step up your entertainment experience at home. Click here to see what’s coming from Govee as announced at CES.