I'm _very_ surprised this worked at all. I'd have thought HBO et al would have wanted a good (Cisco NDS, Nagra, Conax etc) CAS layer to prevent this kind of stuff happening as part of any agreements to be carried on the network.
In the past I've worked on a few IPTV projects. Users would only see channels they were entitled to (unlike Sat / Cable) projects, and there was a heavy CAS layer.
Interesting though. A lot of boxes are essentially just running an embedded browser so there's scope for some poking around.