TV3 has been announced as the official broadcast partner for the IFTAs this year, but things are going to change fairly drastically for the awards ceremony. 

After a bit of backlash last year that found the show to be totes awkward, like (you can check our Twitter feed, really), RTÉ and the IFTAs have broken off their on-again-off-again relationship of the past thousand years and the ceremony has moved on to a new home with TV3...sort of. 

The announcement was made today that the Ballymount-based broadcaster would be showing the ceremony, but not before they decided to split the whole thing into two different awards dos: "The IFTA Film & Drama Awards will be held on 24th May, while The IFTA Television Awards will be held later in the year in October". Value, a 2-for-1 deal, we presume. 

However, TV3 have decided not to show the whole thing and they will instead show "coverage of all the excitement, guests, nominees and winners at the ceremony in an exclusive one hour Awards Special", and added that the ceremony itself won't be broadcast live or as-live at any stage.

The TV awards will take place in October, and will be shown as "a primetime two hour programme, featuring some of the best creative talent that Ireland has to offer and will see the introduction of some new interactive and public voting categories...allowing the Irish public to become more involved in the ceremony". Presumably they will not be reading out a live feed of the tweets.

There does seem to be a small problem with the scheduling already though, as pointed out by Donald Clarke:

Anyway, the ceremonies will receive coverage from Xposé and Ireland AM in the run up to the shows, while announcements on who the hosts will be for both shows are set to happen in the coming weeks. 

Via IFTN.ie