They might still need a satellite connection and their deactivated access cards inserted to get beyond the initial startup screens and the fallback interface that lets you access the setup menus and some limited functions like recordings.
Also, Media Share only natively supports MPEG-2 video, MP3 audio or JPEG images, anything else needs to be transcoded on the fly by your DLNA server. On Windows 7 the Windows Media Player Network Sharing service did this automatically, but Microsoft removed the transcoding capabilities from Network Sharing on the newer versions of Windows.
If all you care about is accessing network media on additional TVs in your house that don't have satellite service, there are a lot better devices out there that serve the same function. Installing VLC on any cheap android or fire TV stick and using its network browser will give you native support for a lot more common containers and codecs like .avi, .mp4, .mkv, aac, ac3, HEVC and H264.
