The three people with the highest number of votes would be guaranteed a place in the House with the top 50 others to go through a second selection process.

For the first time in Big Brother Australia history, the public could vote which housemates they wanted to see in the House before the start of the show.

Promotional advertisements for the new season premiered on 6 April 2008 featuring a short video of former Australian Prime Minister John Howard criticising the show in 2006, stating that Channel Ten should "get this stupid show off the air", followed by the tagline "I Don't Think So" from the eponymous Kelis track.

It was the first Big Brother Australia finale to feature three finalists and the first hosted by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O.

The nomination and eviction processes were changed for this season and those elements were both covered in the same weekly episode of the program.

Big Brother: UpLate did not air this season due to Ten's late night programming schedule being used for Indian Premier League cricket telecasts in May and June.

In comparison to 2007's broadcast, this season saw 11 hours less free-to-air telecasts a week, solely due to the absence of Mike Goldman's Big Brother: UpLate.

Television broadcast episodes featured a slightly updated logo and graphics, and much shorter theme music intros to each show.

At the start of this season, Big Brother announced to the housemates that "snap evictions" will be executed at various points during the show.

Carson Kressley arrived and gave the housemates a makeover to promote his new show, How to Look Good Naked.

Rima was originally a housemate, but left after breaking her leg on the first Friday Night Live games.

Academic Alan McKee singled-out the departure of previous host Gretel Killeen as having weakened the season.

Jackie is quite limp and Kyle prides himself on just being wrong—he will always say the wrong, obnoxious thing and hurt people.

"[15] By the eviction show on 1 June 2008, the program's ratings were said to have "almost flatlined on Sunday night, dropping below 500,000 in the key demographic along the East Coast."

Host Kyle Sandilands called in sick for this program and his co-hosting duties were handled by usual show announcer and narrator Mike Goldman.

[16] Sandilands missed his second eviction show the following week, 8 June 2008, after again calling in sick, with a severe chest infection.

The choice of eccentric housemates and an appearance by Corey Worthington was seen as an attempt "to highlight the superficially weird" while the absence of Uplate and Uncut for 2008 was judged by Craven as being a mistake.

Craven judged Kyle Sandilands the more intelligent of the new hosts, but noted he gave no impression of having kept up with the show, as Killeen always did.

Craven believed Sandilands to be "sensationally ill-suited to the format, which requires a warm embrace of the Big Brother ethos.

Ten's chief programmer, David Mott, admitted the season had recently experienced "audience erosion" and widespread criticism of the new hosts.

The lowest-rating component of the season was the Big Mouth late night weekly panel show.