Updated: Hulu says that they are doing server maintenance. The timing of it is seriously stupid – 9 am PST or 12 PM EST – not exactly off hours for web users. Some one should be spanked for the unfortunate timing of this “maintenance.”

When it comes to Hulu, I was the first to eat humble pie, lauding them for their quality and their easy-to-use interface. I appreciated the quality of content they sent our way, which made my recovery easier. Thanks to their professional library they have been making a lot of money and could do about $25 million in revenues. Glad to see that others, including YouTube haters, are finally catching on to their changing fortunes.

So when Liz pointed me a link to her latest story, I was doubly disappointed. (NewTeeVee has screenshots.) Essentially, Hulu has stopped embedded videos from playing on other web sites, though they continue to play back on official Hulu partner sites like AOL, and Fancast still appears to work.

Is this an outage or is this a sign that Hulu has started to behave like an incumbent with a backward-looking mindset? I hope this is a mistake and not a sign that the Hollywood cabal is behaving like one. I want Hulu to be around – it is my DVR in the cloud and I love it.