About this guide
This site is written by the people who manufacture the lighting controllers and write the apps that drive them.
Who we are
Long-Term New Media Limited designs and manufactures LED lighting controllers and decorative lighting. We have been doing it for over nine years, and our products ship to customers in more than 100 countries.
Our range covers colour LED strip and controllers, curtain lights, firework lights, Christmas and festive strings, eave and outdoor outline lighting, TV backlighting, automotive interior ambient lighting, solar garden lighting, and functional lighting for stairs, cabinets and aquariums — around forty product categories in total.
We design the control solution — hardware and software
Most companies selling decorative lighting buy their control electronics from one supplier and their app from another. We are the supplier. For every product line we work on, both halves are ours: the controller hardware and the application that drives it.
We develop sixteen control applications — Lotus Lantern, LotusLamp X, Magic Lantern, iMeshting and LightsPlay among them. They are published on Google Play and the App Store, and they are all free. We also produce white-label builds for partner brands who ship our controllers under their own name.
So if you bought a light from a brand you have never heard of, and it came with an app that looks a lot like one of ours, that is usually because the electronics and the software inside it are ours. The brand on the box is our customer.
Which means we often do not sell you the light
This is worth being straight about. A large share of the products this guide discusses reach you through partner brands rather than from us. We designed the controller and wrote the app; someone else built the enclosure, printed the box and sold it.
That is precisely why this guide exists in the form it does. We see the same questions arrive from customers of dozens of different brands about hardware we designed, and we are usually the only people who can answer them properly — the brand that sold you the light often cannot explain why its colours come out wrong, because they did not build that part.
Why that matters for what you read here
There is no shortage of pages on the internet explaining what an IP rating is or how RGB differs from RGBIC. We are not trying to add to that pile.
What we can tell you that a general lighting blog cannot is the specific stuff: which of our apps actually pairs with the light in your hand, what fails first on a firework light left outside through a winter, why the colours come out wrong on some strips and where in the app you fix it, and what customers across a hundred-odd countries actually write in about.
So that is what this guide covers. Where a topic is genuinely generic and covered better elsewhere, we would rather link out than pad the page.
How we write it
- We say when something is our own product and when it is general advice. Guidance that applies to any brand's lighting is written that way; where behaviour is specific to our controllers or our apps, we say so.
- Photographs are ours. Product and installation photographs on this site are taken in our own workshop and test area. Where an image is an illustration rather than a photograph, it is labelled as one.
- We do not publish numbers we have not measured. If we do not have a figure, the guide says so rather than estimating one.
- Pages get corrected. Each page carries the date it was last reviewed. If you find something wrong, please tell us.
What we sell, and what we do not do here
We are a manufacturer, so we do have a commercial interest — we would rather you bought our lights than someone else's. We think the honest way to handle that is to say it plainly and then write guides that are useful whether or not you own our products.
This guide does not sell anything. There is no shop, no cart and no quote form on these pages. Our apps are free downloads with no paid tier.
Contact
Corrections, questions and things we have got wrong: get in touch.