Possibly starting a stream?

Not sure. I've never even watched streams, but I've long considered doing one. What is the best site to stream on? The only sites I know of are Twitch.tv, Justin.tv and own3d.tv. Also, how do I go about setting it up? Is the software free? Is it hard easy? Any tips or pointers would be helpful.

twitch.tv and justin.tv are actually the same site. justin.tv created twitch.tv as a spinoff to cater specifically to gamers.

own3d.tv seems to be slightly more popular but, I haven't really heard any particular complaints about either service.

One thing own3d does that twitch doesn't is allow multiple streams under one channel. So if you and a few friends wanted to get together you could share a channel, which I assume means sharing the potential partner status and such.

Also own3d.tv uses QuakeNet IRC for its chat while twitch.tv has its own web chat. There are pros and cons to both, but twitch.tv requires you to have an account to join the chat, whereas QuakeNet IRC does not, and you can use any IRC client to connect to it.

Neither of those are particularly compelling reasons to choose one service over the other though. That's about all the help I can offer since I've never streamed, myself ;P

I never like the QuakeNet stuff, it seemed really outdated and you have to like send messages to a bot or something to make an account? Really confusing since there is no site you can just "register" on.

/recommend twitch.tv easy to setup and easy to maintain

I dont know how to set up on twitch but i stream on own3d and this is easy to set up too. You find a easy guide on google if you search for "how to stream on own3d" and its free.

I was wrong, apparently twitch is overall more popular;

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=t&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&u=own3d.tv&&u=twitch.tv&

We just get a lot of stream submissions from own3d, maybe it's specifically popular with DotA2/LoL streamers. A lot of the pros stream on own3d for some reason.

My 2 cents (for what it's worth)... one thing I've noticed in my responsibility for adding the live stream links to the sites is that when a user who uses own3D is offline, it simply shows 'user offline', where as with twitch, you can select a photo or otherwise creative image to be displayed on your profile instead.

Thought this was worth mentioning.

They both have their pros and cons, we use twitch.tv mostly because we're more familiar with the crew behind it. Tobi uses own3d for similar reasons.

As for streaming software I use https://www.xsplit.com/. Xsplit is in beta so it's currently free to use, when it goes retail you'll have to pay for licensing but as far as I know that's no time soon.

The software is reletively easy to use, question is what are you PC specs like and what's your internet upload speed like? Streaming is reletively resource intensive on both accounts so if you're using dated hardware or live somewhere with ****ty net (Australia) you may have some issues.

If anyone could help me it would be appreciated.

I got my stream up and running, problem is, when I play a game I get maybe 1.5 second delay. It's not a frame rate drop, just delay.

That's intended, there will always be a delay in what you do and it appearing online. As you can understand it takes time to upload to your channel and that delay is that time.