It seems we're more obsessed with light than ever as a people. When it's time to sleep, we're supposed to have a bedroom as dark as the inside of a cave on a starless night. When it's time to turn on the TV, we want it bright enough to challenge the sun.

Of course, this means when it's time to leave the comfort of your living room, you're effectively blind. One way to partially solve this is to put a light behind your TV screen. The Govee Immersion TV Backlight promises to not just help save your vision, but to enrich your TV viewing experience as well.

What's In the Box?

In the box you get more than you might expect. Of course there is the light strip itself plus a power supply, but that's only the beginning.

The Govee Immersion TV Backlight has a few tricks up its sleeve, and for this, it requires extra hardware. Specifically, it uses a camera to match the colors on your TV screen. It also has a controller box that you plug the light strip, power supply, and camera into.

Along with all this, you get extra mounting hardware for the strip itself as well as seven mysterious-looking orange foam squares that we'll get to a little later on.

Why Would You Want a TV Backlight?

Whether or not you'll actually see any real benefit of having a TV backlight depends on where your TV is. If you have a dedicated TV viewing space, whether it's a separate room or a separate area of a room, you may see a benefit.

Basically, putting a light behind your TV raises the overall level of the lighting in the room you're in. This should reduce eye strain, so if you find yourself getting headaches after watching movies in a dark room, a backlight may help.

At the same time, you may not want to put this in a bedroom, even if you have a large TV in your bedroom, as the overall brightness of the room may be too much.

Reducing eye strain isn't the only reason to use a backlight. By slightly lighting the area behind the TV, your TV will appear to have better contrast. This is because the blacks on screen are appearing against a dim light instead of a shadow.

I've used a simple backlight behind my TV for close to 10 years, though never one actually meant to be used that way. For the past few years I've used a simple LED light strip, so I was curious to see how Govee's offering held up.

Is It Just A Backlight?

The Govee Immersion TV Backlight isn't expensive, but if you only watch a few hours of TV a week, it may seem like spending more than you need to on something you don't use that often.

The good news is you can use it for much more than just TV. Actually, this backlight packs in all the features you'd normally see in a standard color LED strip, complete with Alexa-driven voice controls.

One of the coolest features is the Lighting Effect Center, where other users can share their own creations. Using the DIY mode, you can create and share yours as well.

You can preview these creations via video, then apply them to your own light strip if you like the look. If not, there are plenty more where that came from.

Setting Up the Govee Immersion TV Backlight

As you may imagine, the first stage of setting up the backlight is actually mounting the strip to your TV. The strip has an adhesive backing to help mount it, with additional clips you can use to make sure it's secure once you've got it in the right place.

The strip is actually four separate LED strips joined by cable. This helps the strip fit a variety of TVs, but also means on smaller TVs you'll need to make room for the extra cable.

Next up is the camera that works with the light strip to display the right color behind the TV. You can mount this either on top of or below your screen. As with the strip, the camera includes its own adhesive backing.

Once the strip and camera are mounted, it's a matter of finding where the plug for the strip, the camera, and the plug from the power supply will reach on the back of your TV. Mount the controller here, plug everything in, and you're done with the hardware setup.

To complete setup, you need to install the Govee Home app. While the Govee Immersion Backlight makes use of your Wi-Fi, fortunately it uses Bluetooth for setup, which makes connecting to the app easy.

Using the Govee Home App

Even after you've got the app up and running, you're not quite finished with setup. This is where those mysterious orange foam squares come in.

You need to place these around your screen, then use the app to calibrate the Immersion Backlight camera. For me this process was already mostly complete, since I didn't need to adjust many of the points on the screen to line up with the squares.

If all you want to do is have a bias light behind your TV, similar to the Philips Ambilight technology, you can basically set it and forget it at this point. That said, the Govee Home app can do a lot more.

In addition to TV backlighting, it can also provide backlighting for games, which is similar but brighter and more colorful. You have full control over just how bright that light gets as well as how colorful it is, but the presets make it easy to choose one and roll with it.

The app also has a Music setting to match up with whatever you're listening to. If you prefer static lighting, you can set the backlight to a simple solid color or a gradient, which works especially nicely with neutral wall colors.

Finally, there are several built-in "scenes" that can be fun. The Rainbow setting produces a moving rainbow effect, while Crossing makes for a slightly dizzying swirling effect. There are also several other moving and color-changing effects that are nice to have on while your TV is turned off.

In addition to customizing brightness and saturation, you can also use the app to set a timer to turn the light off. This is handy as it stays on all the time by default, though you can always manually turn it off via the app.

The Viewing Experience

I wanted to see how Govee thinks we should be watching TV, so for the first night out of the box, I left every setting at the default. Not surprisingly, this is roughly comparable to how you'll see most TVs set up by default: flashy, impressive, and completely impractical.

The backlight was too effective at default settings, meaning it often drew my attention away from the screen. It was interesting to watch the backlight do its thing, but after a night or two plus testing it with a few games, I found it completely overbearing.

After changing the overall brightness to around 25 percent and lowering the color saturation, the backlight became much more practical. I also changed the effect to change the whole light at once instead of portions of it.

At the default, I'd find an average scene having one half of the screen red and the other half blue, which wouldn't make sense based on what was on screen. By turning everything down, the effect became much more subtle, but also far more usable.

The great part here is you have complete control of brightness and saturation across various modes and scenes. This means you can have it subdued for movies and TV, slightly more vivid for gaming, and then completely over the top for light shows while your TV is turned off.

Compared to my DIY static bias lighting, I preferred the Govee. I'm not sure I love the potential privacy implications of hooking up an always-on camera with a network connection, but at least it's only pointed at the TV screen.

Should You Buy the Govee Immersion TV Backlight?

This is a simpler question to answer than it would be in most reviews. The real question is: do you like cool lights? If the answer is even anywhere near "yes," then yeah, buy one of these. If you've got two TVs with screens at least 55-inches or larger, buy two.

Keep in mind, this isn't just a rough guideline when it comes to screen size. I tested this backlight with a 55-inch TV and had to get creative with the cabling to get everything to fit properly. On anything smaller, you're going to have trouble getting anything approximating even lighting, so you might want to look for another TV backlight.

Even if you don't find the TV backlight features interesting, this is worth it as an especially feature-rich LED light strip. It can do a lot more, but even if that's all you use it for, Govee's backlight is worth the asking price.