Thanks Ladies & Gents for the great help on this site.

I briefly did some looking on google for a way to pause netflix and did find some keyboard controls but that is not what I want. I have a bash script that plays announcements over the computer speakers at different times of the day. It would be nice if there was some way to pause netflix prior to said announcement.

Of course one must use Google's version of Chrome for netflix to work. So that is the browser that would need to do it. At least in Debian.

I would think hulu and some of the others may be of use too.

Any one have a better starting point than google?