Watching TV

Nobody from outside the UK is going to have the faintest idea what you're talking about. (Freeview is British free-to-air digital terrestrial TV and Sky is digital satellite TV) The answer is because it's digital. On the old analogue system you may have sometimes heard buzzing or clicking sounds, for example when a car goes past or someone next door uses a drill or the fridge motor starts up or stops, well, with a digital system if the signal breaks up the sound is muted. It's like that on DAB radio as well. if you disable the muting which you can on some DAB sets, it sounds really weird when the signal breaks up, it kind of repeats the last sound picked up like a machine gun or a stuck record, it can be really really annoying, like a mad Dalek, so I think that is why the makers and designers of digital TV systems made them do what you describe.

and do people actually PAY for that??

No. That's why it's called "free". Is English not your first language?

no...just not from great britan, so i have no idea what freeview is. from my experiences, just because it has "free" in the title doesn't mean it doesn't cost money. i thought it was some kind of sattelite tv company or some digital cable knock-off.