I don't think you are understanding how they are identifying content. It doesn't need to playing via the built in 'app'. Basically they are fingerprinting the video feed which passes through the video processors in the TV regardless of the source (internal, external, whatever). This is a video analog of what apps like Shazam do to identify songs. If you are playing content from any source on one of these devices they can detect what the content is and report back on it. About the only way you could avoid this is to never connect the TV to your network, but even that may not be sufficient.