Image credit: Joanna Stern / ABC News

Steve Jobs said it many times. Apple TV, the company's small TV add-on, was a hobby. Tim Cook, Apple's current CEO, has used the same term over the last couple of months. But despite that, Apple TV has long been rumored to be more than a hobby - an actual HDTV or TV set with deeper features.

Now appears that the "hobby" has turned into an "intense interest" for the company. In an interview with NBC's Brian Williams Tim Cook has spoken a little bit more about the company's TV plans - or at least implied that there are plans.

"When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years," Cook told Williams. "It's an area of intense interest. I can't say more than that."

That's the most we've heard yet from Apple about its future plans for the TV space.

Cook didn't elaborate, but perhaps Steve Jobs' words give us the best idea of what Apple might be working on.

"The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it," Jobs said in 2008 at the AllThingsD conference.

And then from Walter Issacson's biography of Jobs: "It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."