Marketers are increasingly alert to the threat of misplaced advertising funding pirate content on the web. But ads from household-name brands are up to five times more common on pirate content streamed through Connected TV and Over-The-Top devices, according to research by content piracy experts White Bullet that identifies TV apps as a very real new threat to the safety of premium brands.



Up to 25% of ads detected in apps carrying pirated sport and entertainment content come from big-name brands, compared to just 5% of the ads on web-based pirate streaming sites, White Bullet has found. But in spite of massive and accelerating consumer uptake of streaming content online, most brands and ad networks are entirely unaware that their advertising is bankrolling illegal content in the OTT / CTV space. Overall, around 60% of advertising in-app bears a brand of some kind, the rest being sponsored articles, porn or fraud and malware. 



This picture of the previously undiagnosed TV app piracy problem comes as White Bullet offers its in-app ad-tracking service to first movers - the first of its kind and a lifeline to brands and ad providers who have previously been oblivious to the galloping levels of ad-funded piracy already detectable in the CTV / OTT ecosystem.



TV apps sign up with ad networks to draw advertising in the same way websites do, but the complexity of tracking CTV / OTT advertising means that, until now, there has been no way to tell whether or not ad-funded apps were streaming legitimate, legal content.



“We can clearly see a shift taking place towards a different avenue of piracy,” says White Bullet product director Dana Neale. “There is a lot more branded advertising in app, and that is because there is almost no transparency in the ad supply chain, and unlike web piracy there are no law-enforcement programmes to tackle pirate connected TV.”



To find out how you can protect your brand in In-App / OTT / CTV, please get in touch