The contents of each TeX Live release are also available as large compressed tar files in the historic archive (under systems/texlive). They are primarily for the benefit of distro developers, since tar files are easier to work with than ISO images. They are not useful as a direct user-level installation source.
The tar files include: texmf (the texmf trees), source (TL-specific sources), devsource (TL infrastructure tools), bin (the binaries distributed with TL), and extra (miscellaneous other files).
The active TeX Live development sources are available through entirely different method. They are not related to the devsource tarballs, despite the name.
Information about installing TeX Live directly over the Internet is available separately, as well as other ways to acquire TeX Live.