I am streaming small movies (1-3MB) off my website into my app. I have a slicehost webserver, I think it's a "500MB slice". Not sure off the top of my head how this translates to bandwidth, but I can figure that out later. My experience with MPMoviePlayerLoadStateDidChangeNotification is not very good. I get much more reliable results with the old MPMoviePlayerContentPreloadDidFinishNotification If I get a MPMoviePlayerContentPreloadDidFinishNotification, the movie will play without stuttering, but if I use MPMoviePlayerLoadStateDidChangeNotification, the movie frequently stalls. I'm not sure which load state to check for: enum { MPMovieLoadStateUnknown = 0, MPMovieLoadStatePlayable = 1 << 0, MPMovieLoadStatePlaythroughOK = 1 << 1, MPMovieLoadStateStalled = 1 << 2, }; MPMovieLoadStatePlaythroughOK seems to be what I want (based on the description in the documentation): MPMovieLoadStatePlaythroughOK Enough data has been buffered for playback to continue uninterrupted. Available in iOS 3.2 and later. but that load state NEVER gets set to this in my app. Am I missing something? Is there a better way to do this?