The invention relates to the control of networked lighting systems, particularly large scale networked lighting systems, and more specifically to an efficient transmission of messages to control luminaries of a networked
lighting system. A basic idea of the invention is to provide an efficient and flexible
multicast, particularly group cast message that addresses several or a group of luminaires, and that can control the addressed luminaries in an efficient way by compressing the distributed light settings using a function in order to reduce the communicational overhead. An embodiment of the invention relates to a method for controlling a networked
lighting system comprising the steps of—selecting several controllable luminaries of the networked
lighting system (S10), —combining control information for each one of the selected luminaries to a set of
information control information (S12), —selecting at least one predetermined function for compressing the set of control information by associating an input related to a selected controllable luminary to the control information for the selected controllable luminary from the set of control information (S14), —creating a
multicast message addressed to the selected luminaries and comprising information regarding the selected predetermined function (S16), and—transmitting the created
multicast message (S18).