Hacker News Reader

Seems a little confusing yes, but looks like they rewrote the player from scratch to better unify interfaces across platforms and improve usability. It's also open source [0].

As with most new features, they're releasing for PlexPass first and moving to (free) public availability after a waiting period.

[0] https://github.com/plexinc/plex-media-player

Nope, just that the preview is for Plex Pass subscribers. They usually roll things out at previews for the premium people first.

> Will it be available to everyone? The new app is launching as an early preview version for our Plex Pass subscribers. Once the preview period ends, it will be available to all users; we’ll make another announcement when that happens.

Its still free, its just no longer fully open source, they've released a new app which shares its UI with their other apps.

This is exactly what I thought as well. I use Home theatre at the moment and don't have a plex pass.. does that mean I can no longer do so?

No. They stated that Home Theater is still available and open sourced, although they are not working on further development and are focusing on the new Plex Media Player instead.