How to handle AVPlayer errors while the app is running in the background?

Question

I am using AVPlayer to play an audio stream, and it's possible to keep it playing in the background. I'm wondering how could I handle a situtation where the user loses internet connectivity, so that I could provide some feedback or maybe try to re-establish the playback after some seconds.

EDIT: I know that the question regards AVPlayer, but if you have an answer with MPMoviePlayerController it might be useful as well. Right now, by using MPMoviePlayerController, I'm trying to get the MPMovieFinishReasonPlaybackError case of the MPMoviePlayerPlaybackDidFinishReasonUserInfoKey, by subscribing to the MPMoviePlayerPlaybackDidFinishNotification but if f.e. my audio is playing in the background and I turn airplane mode on, I never get this notification; I only get MPMovieFinishReasonPlaybackEnded, and I don't know how to separate that from the case that the user stops the audio himself.

Answer 1

I tried looking around for the actual source but I remember reading somewhere that if the audio playback stops (for whatever reason) it kills the background thread. The person writing about the issue talked about possible feeding the stream some empty audio content to keep the thread alive. You might be able to send a local notification from a call back error notifying the user that the audio experienced an error and will have to be manually restarted from within the application. Haven't played around with the API enough to know which callback is the best one to use in this case. If I find the link I'm looking for I'll update.

EDIT: Here's Grant Pannell's take on audio streaming and multitasking.