HD video would also be competing with science data for both storage and transfer time. If you read the blog of the MER driver at http://marsandme.blogspot.com/

HD video would also be competing with science data for both storage and transfer time. If you read the blog of the MER driver at http://marsandme.blogspot.com/ http://marsandme.blogspot.com/ you can see this tension already play out sometimes, both in scheduling nice panoramic pictures and managing the data storage until a transfer window opens. Science normally wins. :) One of the surprising thing to me about the internet response to curiosity is that I've seen many commenters who seem to assume we can stream live HD video from Mars; some expected it to somehow manage this feat even while landing. But really, Curiosity talks directly to Earth at only 32kbps, and has around 16 minutes per day of high-bandwidth (2 mbps or less) communication with the Mars orbiters.