More noticeable? A ticker shouldn't be noticeable. You should be able to watch the channel without being distracted which the BBC's ticker does. I personally think Sky's looks awful. Granted, I preferred it when it was white with black letters and used a nicer font than Gill Sans (Swiss wasn't it?) back in 2007.
I disagree. If it's not noticeable, there's no point in it being there, and I can't think of any way in which the BBC News ticker is more distracting than the ticker designs used on other channels.
The ticker is at its most useful when the sound is off (and let's not forget that a lot of rolling news is watched with minimal or no sound), when you're watching in a pub or at an airport etc, and it also provides information on other stories that are developing or have already occurred. It provides a further anchor to hold your attention on the channel; if the sound is off, you can get a reasonably quick summary of major stories; if the sound is on, but you're not especially interested in the package or interview on screen at a particular time, you can glance through other news instead of changing channel or turning your attention to other things.
The ticker is important, and some degree of visibility and noticeability is essential. Although I don't think it's particularly well implemented on Sky News (in fact, I agree that their ticker design is pretty horrible), in principle I liked their decision to present the breaking news ticker in a colour outside of the core brand colour palette in order to draw attention to it. I think the effectiveness of that decision was lost by virtue of the yellow breaking news ticker being on screen virtually all day long a lot of the time, but Sky at least understood the usefulness of the ticker in that regard, and their heavy - and arguably more effective - use of the ticker for a rolling news audience supports the notion that the ticker still has an important role to play.
If anything, I think the BBC News ticker is lost in its own design, especially in a heavy breaking news context, where the logo, info supers and ticker are all rendered in deep red with only the subtlest of shading variation, and I think it would greatly benefit from some change to make it more noticeable. I can just about live with the standard white-on-grey design used for the non-breaking ticker; however, for breaking news, I'd much rather see red text on a white background, for example, which would provide some level of contrast with other graphical elements, rather than just one massive slab of red on the lower third of the screen. A red-on-white ticker would also match the small red-on-white 'BREAKING NEWS' tag used above the main supers.
