How to show paused video instead of black screen when starting AVPlayer

I am able to successfully create a player but was annoyed with the initial black screen. I decided to overlay a UIImageView and hide it once the player started. This worked, but I didn't want the hassle of creating and maintaining images for all my videos.

I was able to achieve the exact results I wanted by playing and immediately pausing the player after instantiating it. The only issue was that sometimes the state of the player was getting recorded incorrectly, so when I went to start the player again, the status was listed as already "playing" even though the player was paused.

I starting looking into using AVPlayerItem seekToTime but haven't found any feasible solutions. Is there a "non hacky" way of achieving this?