Well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Blake Krikorian has joined the board of Amazon, according to several sources close to the situation.

Krikorian — who is considered one of tech’s most savvy execs with regard to video and media distribution — co-founded Sling Media, the maker of the innovative video device Slingbox, in 2004.

(He demoed it at the second D: All Things Digital conference in 2004.)

It was sold in 2007 to EchoStar Communications for $380 million. After a short stint there, Krikorian left and has since been working on a variety of projects and making various investments.

Those include some promising start-ups, such as Lytro, Kno, Clipboard, Chirply and Tasty Labs. Another company he invested in, Clicker, was sold to CBS earlier this year.

He has also been a sought-after exec — sources said he had offers over the last year from Google and also Zynga.

Amazon certainly could use a director such as Krikorian as it seeks to enter the media distribution space more aggressively. It is about to launch a Kindle tablet, for example, and also is a major bidder for the Hulu premium video service.

It has been rumored that Amazon will soon offer an interactive television device, too.

Krikorian certainly has much experience in the arena. One of his first jobs was at the fabled General Magic, which pioneered the creation of one of the first interactive mobile products before the Internet.

He also started a mobile computing unit for Philips Electronics, as well as working in adjacent arenas at other firms.

The University of California at Los Angeles graduate has a degree in mechanical engineering.

Other directors on Amazon’s eight-person board, besides CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, include Kleiner Perkins’s Bing Gordon and Hewlett-Packard’s Jon Rubinstein.

Krikorian, who declined to comment, will be its ninth member.

I also have an email in to Amazon PR, and will update if I get a response.

UPDATE: No need, as here is the 8-K regulatory filing by Amazon announcing the appointment:

AMZN-20110908-8K-20110908

Speaking on the sidelines of the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Mr. Krikorian said television manufacturers like Sony (SNE) and Samsung have an opportunity to band together to compete with companies that are developing ways to blend traditional cable programming with Internet content.

Mr. Krikorian expressed deep skepticism that Google, in particular, could dominate the market of piping digital television and other Internet content into consumers’ living rooms. It is also an open question, he said, whether Apple, whose Apple TV software he praised, can take a lead in the space, or whether cable companies or even TV manufacturers have an opportunity to step in.

Mr. Kirkorian was a central player in the first wave of attempts to connect the Internet and television, founding Sling Media, which makes it possible for users to watch content from their home TVs on mobile phones and computers. He sold Sling Media to EchoStar in 2007 but has continued to advise a number of small and large companies in the digital-media industry.

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Brothers Blake and Jason Krikorian, CEO and SVP-business development, are out, effective immediately. Jason Hirschhorn, who runs the company’s Sling Media Entertainment unit, plans on staying through the end of February; Ben White, chief creative officer at the entertainment group, will stay on through Feb. 1.

Some background from paidContent’s Staci Kramer, who had the story first:

Also leaving: Greg Wilkes, VP-sales. I’ve been told COO John Gilmore will take the reins for now but that may not be official. While no one is talking about any differences, there certainly is a big cultural gap between the tech-creative side and the traditional cable team at EchoStar.”

To tease that out: The Sling team can rightly point to a string of successes–the company racked up a number of awards at both the Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld last week–but if things were humming smoothly at Echostar, you’d think the company would find a way to make them stick around.

The Slingbox is a potentially disruptive technology, but it’s still nascent, and Sling.com just launched late last year and will need a motivated team to help it gain traction in a crowded field. All those involved say they’ll be taking time off; everyone who knows the team involved finds that hard to believe.

EchoStar grabbed ownership of the start-up that makes devices and software that allow a user to move media to a variety of other locations. Hence, the Sling name.

I have always thought the concept of being able to take content and send it to any device at any time was a critically important one. As it turns out, it turned out to be the precursor to a lot of the moves toward the more distributed, widgetized Web model developing now.

In fact, Walt and I demoed Sling at D2 in 2004, pictured above, right after the device launched. Since then, Sling has morphed into much more than simply a hardware play to encompass software services related to media delivery in a number of ways.

But the basic concept remained the same: Media Must Move.

I hope the deal putting Sling into the hands of one particular part of that raging river of information and content does not hinder this important mission for Sling and Krikorian, its chairman and CEO.

That’s especially important in this critical time, when big media companies finally seem to be coming around to the notion that ubiquitous distribution is the only way to go.

That was not always the case. At the time Sling was launched, I got a call from a major network exec who asked me all about the company, which I had written about several times.

At first, I was pleased he had some savvy about a cutting-edge technology, but then realized he was only interested because the media giant was considering suing Sling out of existence.

Apparently, increasing the number of screens its content could be seen on exponentially took a backseat to unfounded fears of copyright infringement.

In this interview on the PaidContent site with Staci Kramer, Krikorian promised the company would remain operator-agnostic, noting, “We expect very little change to our business except that we have even deeper pockets, and access to other core technologies.”

The company struck the deal as it was looking for a new round of funding. It had already raised a pile of cash–introducing a new hardware concept does not come cheap–totaling almost $57 million.

That came from traditional VCs like Mobius Venture Capital (in a deal born at D2, in fact), as well as other power players like Liberty Media and Hearst Media. EchoStar has also been an investor.