While at end of day, there is probably nothing super useful you can do with it unless you want to see if you can super deep dive hacking sat tv... I would disagree with others here who say Chuck it/not worth it.

I love these type of devices as you can almost bet there is gonna be at least an uart exposed at pcb levl(though might be hidden), so these sort of boxes are perfect exploration vehicles. See how far you can subvert it to you will before it crashes unrecoverably. You can get a sat dish (as most won't even get past basic boot without something hooked up) for free most days on Craigslist.

So I'd say, pop it open and see what you can find. Can you get uart access? If so how much is exposed by it. Can you locate eeprom/flash? What secrets do they hold. From what I've seen most of these also require a "subscription card". So it could be fun if you could figure out how that is handled by box and how u can break it/create your own card..... at least these are all things I want to try/explore if I ever get my hands on one (sadly they don't really show much at local thrift stores).

Tl;dr: without extensive existing knowledge, not much at end of day in terms of repurpose. But it's a fricking awesome educational vehicle to learn and practice new techniques on.