The invention relates to an ambience lighting system, typically for use in conjunction with a display device. The ambience lighting system may be of the type AmbiLight. The ambience lighting system comprises one or more light sources associated to subregions of the display screen; a content characterizer for determining content characteristics of image data of the sub-regions; and a controller to control the color of the emitted ambience light in accordance with determined content characteristics. The content characterizer is further adapted to determine content characteristics of a global region of the display screen, and the controller is adapted to control the color of the emitted ambience light in accordance with the determined content characteristics of the subregions and of the global region.