A management shakeup has severely affected Sling Media, the company that basically enables its customers to push their cable shows to their laptops from anywhere worldwide. The company's co-founders, Blake and Jason Krikorian, are leaving, and so are executives Jason Hirschhorn and Ben White.

Sling Media's senior executives have agreed to stay a year following the company's acquisition by EchoStar for about $380 million, but that year is up and it looks like all of Sling's entrepreneurial leadership is walking away. However, they've avoided the fierce competition that would how probably followed up, as their rivals are Hulu, YouTube, Major League Baseball and Apple.

As reason for their decision to leave the company, the Kirkorian brothers said that they prefer to run their own business. For now, representatives for EchoStar and Sling declined to comment on the departures, but these follow a raft of product announcements by the company at Macworld and at the CES last week.

The Krikorian brothers founded Sling in 2004, after they served as CEO and partner of id8 Group, a technology consulting firm. The company unveiled its main product Slingbox, the next year. Basically, the gadget allows users to watch TV shows streamed from their set-top boxes or saved on their DVRs while away from home by sending signals over the Internet to a computer or a mobile phone. However, EchoStar has not managed to broke out Sling's results since the acquisition in October 2007.

Sling has recently launched an app for the iPhone, at Macworld. Furthermore, the company also launched Sling.com, a web video portal that competes with Hulu. It remains to be seen if Sling Media will at least keep up its sales during the “Krikorian period” with the new execs that will come.