Ask HN: Why doesn't NASA live stream the Curiosity video feed?

Because it doesn't send live video back to Earth. It sends pictures to the satellites that orbit Mars, which relay the data to Earth, and it only has periodic contact with those satellites.

So I don't think it has the bandwidth for video. It'll probably be a fairly slow data rate, more like a progressive GIF downloading.

I suppose it could record video, and send it back, but it wouldn't be real-time.

Here's an article about Curiosity's image capturing capabilities. It'll take some pictures first thing when it lands, but we won't get them for about two hours, because of the timing of the satellite orbits.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-226