Scenario: We stream the BBC news channel through a laptop hooked to a PC in reception for our clients. Annoyingly the stream is interrupted randomly (the line isn't dropping, it's the BBC's problem). Therefore when it's interrupted we get an error screen appearing which we have to go and manually refresh to get the stream back playing.

My intentions are to build an app which will be run alongside (silently) the stream monitoring intermittently a range of pixels. If the range matches the error screen that I mentioned previously then I'd call "Esc" to exit the full screen and then "F5" to refresh the browser and finally a double click on a specified coordinate to bring it back to full screen.

Problem: I've been doing some googling and so far have only seen related posts where the comparison is between two saved images. Due to this I expect the answer to be "Take a screenshot every now and then, compare, return result".

Is there a way to accomplish this without taking screen shots?