Info here is not really accurate. You can get access to most anything you want from your dropcam w/o making it public. I was looking around for some info on the recent change they have implemented that broke the way you could access streams from your private dropcams and came accross this forum. for the record, you can get access to whatever you want from your dropcam. The way they have implemented their "developer" program is pretty lame and quite arrogant. I'll be so happy when their entrie business model is destroyed in about 3 weeks with the release of some pretty cool software. Anyways, you may have to jump through hoops to get it, but most everything you want from your dropcam available. getting access to the current snapshot is quite easy. In some of the integrations I've made you can just continually get the current snapshot and in most ways get close to replicating the video stream, but they seem to be catching on to this and start to throttle requests. the stream is a little screwed up right now, but with some digging it is workable. there are a few projects that provide api access to dropcams. I've seen a python one, a ruby one and most recently a go one.
hope that's of interest/help.
