I've made a mistake. I was accessing AVPlayer.status instead of AVPlayerItem.status. Now the status and error avaialable. I'm getting following error: Error Domain=AVFoundationErrorDomain Code=-11821 "Cannot Decode" UserInfo={NSLocalizedFailureReason=The media data could not be decoded. It may be damaged., NSLocalizedDescription=Cannot Decode, NSUnderlyingError=0x281dc83f0 {Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-12911 "(null)"}} But still would be great to have a confirmation that this is because f the size/quality of video.