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DRM is not the reason youtube uses flash, browser support and feature usage. HTML5 video APIs are still frustrating to use compared to flash's pretty well built-out mechanisms.

Advertisers also love to serve video ads on a flash platform because it lets them perform custom analytics, logic, etc.

And don't forget the part where flash is a backdoor to users computers. It can bypass proxies and give them your real IP, and I'm not sure even google will want that to go away.

> YouTube still uses Flash as the main player

That's odd; I just loaded up a YouTube video and it's the HTML5 player. Maybe I have it enabled in settings somewhere; huh, nope, in incognito mode it's still HTML5.

Must be a chrome thing - in Firefox it's flash. Probably something to do with the codecs available in Firefox HTML5.

What kind of DRM? I haven't come across a YouTube video where it fell back to Flash in ages.

No They don't need flash to do DRM. Chrome has the widevine plugin that adds DRM to html5.